In honor of Brain Aware­ness Week 2013, which starts today, let’s debunk ten myths about brain fit­ness and brain train­ing that remain sur­pris­ingly popular.

Top 10 brain fit­ness and brain train­ing myths, debunked:

Myth 1. Genes deter­mine the fate of our brains.
Fact: Life­long brain plas­tic­ity means that our lifestyles and behav­iors play a sig­nif­i­cant role in how our brains (and there­fore our minds) phys­i­cally evolve.

Myth 2. We are what we eat. Read the rest of this entry »

Cour­tesy of the recent study Neu­romyths in edu­ca­tion: Preva­lence and pre­dic­tors of mis­con­cep­tions among teach­ers, by Sanne Dekker et al, here you have 32 brain-related state­ments. Are they cor­rect or incorrect?

1. We use our brains 24 h a day (C ).
2. Chil­dren must acquire their native lan­guage before a sec­ond lan­guage is learned. If they do not do so nei­ther lan­guage will be fully acquired (I).
3. Boys have big­ger brains than girls (C ). Read the rest of this entry »

We just noticed that the Alliance for Aging Research offers an excel­lent list of ref­er­ences on Brain Health Research, orga­nized in these 10 sec­tions below. Enjoy!

#1 Nour­ish Your Nog­gin: Eat a Brain Healthy Diet 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 »

Do we all have a “brain age”? Are all brain exer­cises equal? Does aging mean decline?

Answer­ing these ques­tions prob­a­bly requires to debunk a few myths about the brain.

Under­stand­ing how our brain func­tions can help under­stand how it is pos­si­ble for our brain to change, and what we can do to make these changes hap­pen. This is why know­ing how our brain works is the first habit to acquire on the road to boost­ing brain functions.

Wouldn’t it be very hard for a musi­cian to get bet­ter at play­ing the clar­inet if he didn’t know that it is the air that his mouth pulses into the instru­ment that cre­ates its sounds? In the same way lim­ited knowl­edge about the brain may be one of the rea­sons why many peo­ple do not take action to try to opti­mize the way their brain work.

Here are 10 Brain and Brain Fit­ness Myths, debunked for you: Read the rest of this entry »