We have tracked for sev­eral years the sci­en­tific stud­ies pub­lished by Torkel Kling­berg and col­leagues, often won­der­ing aloud, “when will edu­ca­tors, health pro­fes­sion­als, exec­u­tives and main­stream soci­ety come to appre­ci­ate the poten­tial we have in front of  us to enhance our brains and improve our cog­ni­tive functions?”

Dr. Kling­berg has just pub­lished a very stim­u­lat­ing pop­u­lar sci­ence book, The Over­flow­ing Brain, that should help in pre­cisely that direc­tion. Given the impor­tance of the topic, and the qual­ity of the book, we have named  The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­ory The Sharp­Brains Most Impor­tant Book of 2008, and asked Dr. Kling­berg to write a brief arti­cle to intro­duce his research and book to you. Below you have. Enjoy!

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Research and Tools to Thrive in the Cog­ni­tive Age

By Dr. Torkel Klingberg

Do we all have atten­tion deficits?

The infor­ma­tion age has pro­vided us with high tech­nol­ogy which fills our days with an ever increas­ing amount of infor­ma­tion and dis­trac­tion. We are con­stantly flooded with on-the-go emails, phone calls, adver­tise­ments and text-messages and we try to cope with the increas­ing pace by multi task­ing. A sur­vey of work­places in the United States found that the per­son­nel were inter­rupted and dis­tracted roughly every three min­utes and that peo­ple work­ing on a com­puter had on aver­age eight win­dows open at the same time. There is no ten­dency for this to slow down; the amount and com­plex­ity of infor­ma­tion con­tin­u­ally increases

The most press­ing con­cerns with this envi­ron­ment are: how do we deal with the daily influx of infor­ma­tion that our inun­dated men­tal capac­i­ties are faced with? At what point does our stone-age brain become insuf­fi­cient? Will we be able to train our brains effec­tively to increase brain capac­ity in order to Read the rest of this entry »

After about age 50, most peo­ple begin to expe­ri­ence a decline in mem­ory capa­bil­ity. Why is that? One obvi­ous answer is that the small arter­ies of the brain begin to clog up, often as a result of a life­time of eat­ing the wrong things and a lack of exer­cise. If that life­time has been stress­ful, many neu­rons may have been killed by stress hor­mones. Given the most recent sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture, reviewed in my book Thank You, Brain, For All You Remem­ber. What You For­got Was My Fault, dead neu­rons can’t be replaced, except in the hip­pocam­pus, which is for­tu­nate for mem­ory because the hip­pocam­pus is essen­tial for mak­ing cer­tain kinds of mem­o­ries per­ma­nent. Another cause is incip­i­ent Alzheimer’s dis­ease; autop­sies show that many peo­ple have the lesions of the dis­ease but have never shown symp­toms, pre­sum­ably because a life­time of excep­tional men­tal activ­ity has built up a “cog­ni­tive reserve.

So is there any­thing you can do about it besides exer­cise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?

Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.

Chang­ing think­ing styles can help. Research shows that Read the rest of this entry »

Here you are have the bi-monthly update with our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter, at the top of this page, if you want to receive this digest by email).

The Neu­ron, The Brain, and Think­ing Smarter

Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Cen­ter (see our pre­vi­ous inter­view with Yaakov Stern on the Cog­ni­tive Reserve) have asked for help in recruit­ing vol­un­teers for an excit­ing clin­i­cal trial. If you are based in New York City, and between the ages of 60 and 75, please con­sider join­ing this study.

More infor­ma­tion below:

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Use it or Lose it?

Train your Brain! Healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 75 liv­ing in NYC are invited to join a study of men­tal fit­ness train­ing. Qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als will play a scientifically-based video game in our lab­o­ra­tory, and will be tested to deter­mine the effects on atten­tion, mem­ory, and cog­ni­tive performance.

You will earn up to $600 plus trans­porta­tion costs if you com­plete the 3-month program.

This excit­ing study is being per­formed by the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Divi­sion of the Sergievsky Cen­ter at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Center.

If inter­ested, con­tact us today: Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the blog car­ni­vals, and other post col­lec­tions, we have con­tributed to this week. Enjoy these col­lec­tions of posts on a vari­ety of top­ics, where we have added a cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science perspective.

Favorites:

• Blog­ging on the Brain (neuroscience)
• Mendel’s Gar­den (genetics)
• Med­i­cine 2.0
• COTC (busi­ness)
• Non-Profit Lead­er­ship
• Fam­ily Life

Other good ones are Read the rest of this entry »

Bran­don Keim writes a nice post on The Future Sci­ence of Altru­ism at Wired Sci­ence Blog, based on an inter­view with Jor­dan Graf­man, chief of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the National Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke.

Bran­don pro­vides good con­text say­ing that “Sci­en­tists, said Graf­man, are under­stand­ing how our brains are shaped by cul­ture and envi­ron­ment, and a mech­a­nism of these changes may involve fluc­tu­a­tion in our genes them­selves, which we’re only begin­ning to under­stand”. (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nur­ture).

And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Graf­man, including

• “One of the ways we dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion.… But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? […]”
• “Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well devel­oped, but not nearly as well devel­oped as our own. If you believe in Dar­win and evo­lu­tion, you argue that the area grew, and the neural archi­tec­ture had to change in some way to accom­mo­date the abil­i­ties asso­ci­ated with that behav­ior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; prob­a­bly a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment that humans took full advan­tage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?”
• “The issue becomes — do we teach this? Train peo­ple to do this? Chil­dren tend to be self­ish, and have to be taught to share.”

The UC Berke­ley mag­a­zine Greater Good tries to answer that ques­tion with a series of arti­cles on Grat­i­tude. I espe­cially enjoyed A Les­son in Thanks, described as Read the rest of this entry »

Tom alerts us (thanks!) of a fun book review in the New York Times today, by Abi­gail Zuger, titled The Brain: Mal­leable, Capa­ble, Vul­ner­a­ble, on the book The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psy­chi­a­trist Nor­man Doidge. Some quotes:

• “In book­stores, the sci­ence aisle gen­er­ally lies well away from the self-help sec­tion, with hard real­ity on one set of shelves and wish­ful think­ing on the other. But Nor­man Doidge’s fas­ci­nat­ing syn­op­sis of the cur­rent rev­o­lu­tion in neu­ro­science strad­dles this gap: the age-old dis­tinc­tion between the brain and the mind is crum­bling fast as the power of pos­i­tive think­ing finally gains sci­en­tific credibility.”
• “So it is for­giv­able that Dr. Doidge, a Cana­dian psy­chi­a­trist and award-winning sci­ence writer, recounts the accom­plish­ments of the “neu­ro­plas­ti­cians,”  as he calls the neu­ro­sci­en­tists involved in these new stud­ies, with breath­less rev­er­ence. Their work is indeed mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff, with impli­ca­tions, as Dr. Doidge notes, not only for indi­vid­ual patients with neu­ro­logic dis­ease but for all human beings, not to men­tion human cul­ture, human learn­ing and human history.”
• “Research into the mal­leabil­ity of the nor­mal brain has been no less amaz­ing. Sub­jects who learn to play a sequence of notes on the piano develop char­ac­ter­is­tic changes in the brain’s elec­tric activ­ity; when other sub­jects sit in front of a piano and just think about play­ing the same notes, the same changes occur. It is the vir­tual made real, a solid quan­tifi­ca­tion of the power of thought.”
• “The new sci­ence of the brain may still be in its infancy, but already, as Dr. Doidge makes quite clear, the sci­en­tific minds are leap­ing ahead.”

Here you have some of our inter­views with a few “sci­en­tific minds” that have, for years, been “leap­ing ahead” beyond “pos­i­tive think­ing” into “pos­i­tive training”:

• Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams and Cog­ni­tive Train­ing. Dr. Gold­berg is a neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist and clin­i­cal pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy at New York Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine. He was a stu­dent and close asso­ciate of the great neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist Alexan­der Luria, and has writ­ten The Exec­u­tive Brain and The Wis­dom Paradox.
• On Cog­ni­tive Sim­u­la­tions for Bas­ket­ball Game-Intelligence: Inter­view with Prof. Daniel Gopher. Dr. Gopher is Pro­fes­sor of Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­ogy and Human Fac­tors Engi­neer­ing at Tech­nion, Israel’s Insti­tute of Sci­ence, and sci­en­tific advi­sor for Intel­li­Gym.
• Mem­ory train­ing and atten­tion deficits: inter­view with Pro­fes­sor Bradley Gib­son, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­ogy at Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame, and Direc­tor of the Per­cep­tion and Atten­tion Lab there
• On Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing and RoboMemo: Inter­view with Dr. Torkel Kling­berg, pro­fes­sor at Karolin­ska Insti­tute, and direc­tor of the Devel­op­men­tal Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Lab, part of the Stock­holm Brain Insti­tute. He is also the sci­en­tific advi­sor for Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing pro­gram (RoboMemo).
• An ape can do this. Can we not? with Dr. James Zull, Pro­fes­sor of Biol­ogy and Bio­chem­istry at Case West­ern Uni­ver­sity, and author of The Art of Chang­ing the Brain.

And a cou­ple of related blog posts:

• Can Thoughts and Action Change Our Brains?
• Books on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and mem­ory training