Founder of Sharp­Brains talks about brain health (Salud­ify): “My pas­sion is learn­ing,” Fer­nan­dez told Salud­ify. “I love learn­ing, and I love to see other peo­ple learn. I just real­ized that if we can improve the way our brains work, in not just me but mil­lions of peo­ple, then we can help every­one learn bet­ter in every sin­gle decade of their lives.” …Fernandez’s work in the field led to the release of the book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness. The impe­tus behind the book came from Fer­nan­dez exam­in­ing pro­fes­sional research related to the brain’s learn­ing abil­ity and func­tion­al­ity at var­i­ous peri­ods of life.

“We thought the book would be per­fect to edu­cate peo­ple on this new under­stand­ing of the brain and equally impor­tant how to apply it to one­self, which is after all what peo­ple really want to do,” Fer­nan­dez said. “It’s what we call brain fit­ness. How peo­ple can main­tain their brains and minds in top shape.” Keep read­ing article

These days, we all live under con­sid­er­able stress — eco­nomic chal­lenges, job demands, fam­ily ten­sions, always-on tech­nol­ogy and the 24-hour news cycle all con­tribute to cease­less worry. While many have learned to sim­ply “live with it,” this ongo­ing stress can, unless prop­erly man­aged, have a Read the rest of this entry »

Elec­tri­cal Brain Stim­u­la­tion Helps Peo­ple Learn Math Faster (Wired): “…sci­en­tists stim­u­lated vol­un­teers’ brains with mild elec­tric cur­rent while they learned new arith­metic oper­a­tions based on made-up sym­bols. Peo­ple who received brain stim­u­la­tion dur­ing train­ing ses­sions on five con­sec­u­tive days learned two to five times faster than those who received sham stim­u­la­tion, and they retained a 30 to 40 per­cent per­for­mance edge six months later… Read the rest of this entry »

Heads up: I’ll be in Toronto this Wednes­day and Thurs­day to speak  on “The Web as a Gym for the Brain” at mesh13, and to present our new book on How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age at MaRS Dis­cov­ery Dis­trict. If you’re attend­ing either, please say Hello! Read the rest of this entry »

Envi­sion­ing The Future With Inven­tor Cori Lathan (NPR): “Com­put­ers were cre­ated to be use­ful tools, but all too often it’s still a chore to get tech­nol­ogy to do our bidding…For exam­ple, work­ing as an engi­neer with astro­nauts at NASA, Lathan real­ized that the phys­i­cal chal­lenges of liv­ing in space in some ways mir­ror the chal­lenges of liv­ing with a dis­abil­ity on Earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Trans­form­ing Diag­no­sis (arti­cle by Thomas Insel, Direc­tor of the NIMH): “In a few weeks, the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion will release its new edi­tion of the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (DSM-5)…While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dic­tio­nary, cre­at­ing Read the rest of this entry »

Study shows men­tal agility game slows cog­ni­tive decline in older peo­ple (Iowa Now): “Wolin­sky and col­leagues sep­a­rated 681 gen­er­ally healthy med­ical patients in Iowa into four groups—each fur­ther sep­a­rated into those 50 to 64 years of age and those over age 65. One group was given com­put­er­ized cross­word puz­zles, while three other groups were exposed to a video game called Read the rest of this entry »