Research series: How, when and why does targeted cognitive training work to promote behavioral and emotional health?

. Explor­ing Tar­get­ed Cog­ni­tive Train­ing for Clin­i­cal Dis­or­ders (Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “Research on the treat­ment of men­tal dis­or­ders often cen­ters on under­stand­ing which treat­ments work. But know­ing that a treat­ment is effec­tive doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly tell us why the treat­ment works. A bet­ter under­stand­ing of the pre­cise mech­a­nisms that 

Read More

News: The SharpBrains Guide, Bestseller in Amazon Kindle Store

We just noticed that The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice, and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp has become #1 book in Ama­zon Kin­dle store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine sec­tion, #1 in Neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy sec­tion, and #2 in Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­o­gy sec­tion. To learn more and order book in sev­er­al stores (Ama­zon, Barnes…

Read More

Average is Beautiful: A test of Attractiveness

Think we all have dif­fer­ent tastes where beau­ty is con­cerned? Well, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy shows us that an aver­age face (made from sev­eral oth­er faces) is almost always judged as more attrac­tive than its con­stituent faces… Why? It may be for the sim­ple rea­son that an aver­age face is clos­er to the men­tal idea we have…

Read More

References on Cognitive Health/ Brain Fitness

This is a par­tial list of the lit­er­a­ture we reviewed dur­ing the research phase of our new book, The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness.  We know many friends of Sharp­Brains are researchers, health­care pro­fes­sion­als, graduate/ Ph.D. stu­dents, who want have direct access to the ref­er­ences (per­haps PubMed should pro­mote itself as a nev­er end­ing source…

Read More

Brain Teaser to Stimulate your Concentration Skills

Learn­ing can be inci­den­tal. We all mem­o­rize facts with­out pay­ing much atten­tion to these facts or with­out will­ing to mem­o­rize them. How­ev­er, when one real­ly wants to mem­o­rize a fact, it is cru­cial to pay atten­tion. Many stud­ies have shown that com­pared to full atten­tion con­di­tions, divid­ing atten­tion dur­ing study time leads to poor memory…

Read More

Nintendo Brain Age/ Training vs. Crossword Puzzles

Nin­ten­do brain-train­er ‘no bet­ter than pen­cil and paper’ (The Times): “The sur­vey of ten-year-old chil­dren found no evi­dence to sup­port claims in Nin­ten­do’s adver­tis­ing cam­paign, fea­tur­ing Nicole Kid­man, that users can test and reju­ve­nate their grey cells. The Nin­ten­do DS is a tech­no­log­i­cal jew­el. As a game it’s fine, said Alain Lieury, pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive psychology…

Read More