You may have  noticed that Amazon.com is shar­ing aggre­gated data on how ebook read­ers inter­act with the books they are read­ing. For exam­ple, the “Pop­u­lar High­lights” sec­tion (towards the bot­tom of our Kin­dle book page) ranks the Top 10 sen­tences that Kin­dle read­ers have high­lighted and shared while read­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp (April 2009; 182 pages; ranked #1 in Kin­dle Store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine section).

This infor­ma­tion is invalu­able to authors and pub­lish­ers - as you can imag­ine, we’ll make sure to not only main­tain but to elab­o­rate on these top­ics as we pre­pare future edi­tions of the book.

So, what are so far the Top Ten Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, Read the rest of this entry »

How can we help younger gen­er­a­tions find the right path to life­long brain health and per­for­mance — espe­cially as they will live longer, and in more dynamic, com­plex envi­ron­ments? We cre­ated the Brain Health across the Lifes­pan series to curate reli­able sources of infor­ma­tion, and here you can  check out  the Top 10 Resources to Bet­ter Under­stand the Teenage Brain.

Wish­ing you and your fam­ily a very brain-fit decade…please enjoy the Decem­ber edi­tion of our monthly eNewslet­ter: Read the rest of this entry »

Numer­ous stud­ies show ben­e­fits of cog­ni­tive train­ing in older adults, despite a recent study ques­tion­ing their valid­ity. The debate on the effects of spe­cific cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions is not settled.

A find­ing that researchers do seem to agree on is that aging is accom­pa­nied by brain and cog­ni­tive decline. These reduc­tions seem to be mod­i­fi­able through cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal exer­cise. In this vein, our lab recently demon­strated that older adults involved in an 8-week mem­ory train­ing pro­gram show less brain atro­phy. This gives some hope for older adults won­der­ing whether their train­ing efforts are really worth­while. Read the rest of this entry »

Cog­ni­tive train­ing (the basis for what we call “brain fit­ness” these days) has a wide array of appli­ca­tions. The most recent one, which is cap­tur­ing public’s imag­i­na­tion, monop­o­liz­ing media cov­er­age, and cre­at­ing cer­tain con­fu­sion, is Healthy Brain Aging. We are for­tu­nate to have Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, offer today his great voice to this con­ver­sa­tion. Enjoy!

- Alvaro
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Mind­ing the Aging Brain

– By Joshua R. Stein­er­man, M.D.

Sci­en­tists, philoso­phers, artists, and experts from all fields of human endeavor lament: it ain’t easy get­ting older. It? Do they refer to frailty and dis­abil­ity? To bod­ily dis­ease? To life at its essence?

It’s all in your head

The mind is not set in stone, but it is encased by bone. It’s really all about the brain, the hyphen in the mind-body conun­drum. That squishy gray neu­ronal jun­gle is the inter­face between inter­nal life and envi­ron­men­tal sen­sa­tions and stim­u­la­tion. As expected, the brain shows signs of aging just as a wrin­kled brow, a stooped pos­ture, or an arthritic fin­ger might. The most com­mon brain changes observed in aging and in age-associated neu­ropsy­chi­atric dis­ease include:

Read the rest of this entry »

Good NYT arti­cle today on how Chemother­apy Fog Is No Longer Ignored as Illu­sion. Quotes:

• “Vir­tu­ally all can­cer sur­vivors who have had toxic treat­ments like chemother­apy expe­ri­ence short-term mem­ory loss and dif­fi­culty con­cen­trat­ing dur­ing and shortly after­ward, experts say. But a vast major­ity improve. About 15 per­cent, or roughly 360,000 of the nation’s 2.4 mil­lion female breast can­cer sur­vivors, the group that has dom­i­nated research on cog­ni­tive side effects, remain dis­tracted years later, accord­ing to some experts. And nobody knows what dis­tin­guishes this 15 percent.”
• “The cen­tral puz­zle of chemo brain is Read the rest of this entry »