(Editor’s Note: every month we host an online Q&A with par­tic­i­pants in the e-course How To Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach. This is the lightly edited and anonymized tran­script from the Jan­u­ary Q&A ses­sion; the Feb­ru­ary Q&A will take place on Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 12th)

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OK, ready to go! Happy 2013 again. You can start writ­ing your ques­tions and com­ments in the box at the bot­tom, and hit Send.

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Ques­tion 
Which activ­i­ties or games or web­sites do you rec­om­mend to improve mem­ory? Read the rest of this entry »

Learn­ing New Lan­guages Helps The Brain Grow (Med­ical News):

“The learn­ing of lan­guages allows the brain to stay “in shape”, by caus­ing cer­tain parts of the brain to grow, includ­ing the hip­pocam­pus and three areas of the cere­bral cortex…This find­ing came from sci­en­tists at Lund Uni­ver­sity, after exam­in­ing young recruits with a tal­ent for acquir­ing lan­guages who were able to speak in Ara­bic, Russ­ian, or Dari flu­ently after just 13 months of learn­ing, before which they had no knowl­edge of the lan­guages Read the rest of this entry »

Time for the Sep­tem­ber edi­tion of the monthly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, start­ing with a good brief New Sci­en­tist arti­cle, Maker of cog­ni­tive train­ing game seeks FDA approval: Imag­ine walk­ing away from a doctor’s office with a pre­scrip­tion to play a video game. Brain Plas­tic­ity, the devel­oper of a cog­ni­tive train­ing game, has begun talks with the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) to mar­ket the game as a ther­a­peu­tic drug.

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy: A Review of Mar­tin Seligman’s Lat­est Book: As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it.

Study: Cog­ni­tive Mark­ers or Bio­mark­ers to man­age Cog­ni­tive Health across the Lifes­pan? Mea­sur­ing people’s changes in cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties is a bet­ter pre­dic­tor of Alzheimer’s dis­ease than changes in bio­mark­ers, researchers from the Ben­ito Menni Com­plex Assis­ten­cial en Salut Men­tal, Barcelona, Spain, reported in Archives of Gen­eral Psy­chi­a­try, a JAMA journal.

Brain Train­ing for Babies: Hope, Hype, Both? We should expect that the brain of a baby could be eas­ily trained. This is what Wass and his col­leagues recently demon­strated in a new study with 11-month-old babies.

Brain Devel­op­ment Through Bilin­gual Edu­ca­tion and Activ­i­ties Requir­ing Self-Control: Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned.

Who Says This is The Class­room of the Future? What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­ogy in lit­er­ally mind­less ways?

AARP’s Best Brain Fit­ness Books: We are hon­ored to announce that AARP has included our very own book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (182 pages; $14.95) in its new List of Best Books on Brain Fitness.

Inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D: Here’s a cool inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D you can play with.

Have a great month of Octo­ber and, as always, feel free to share this enewslet­ter with friends and colleagues.

PS: Did you miss the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (Mar 30 — Apr 1, 2011)? Here you can learn more about how to access the recordings.