Com­pa­nies turn to brain games to tackle work stress (Fortune):

“As more and more jobs rely on knowl­edge work, cre­ativ­ity, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, it’s not enough to have work­ers sit­ting at their desks — they must also be men­tally sharp, emo­tion­ally present, and free from dis­trac­tion. The answer for some: brain training.

The fun, game atmos­phere of My Brain Solu­tions helped Nation­wide achieve another goal: mak­ing the employee assis­tance pro­gram Read the rest of this entry »

As with “expert,” the root of expe­ri­ence is “experiri,” a Latin word mean­ing “to try out.” Peo­ple with a lot of expe­ri­ence should be will­ing to try new things, as their knowl­edge should pro­vide more con­text and points of view, enable more explo­ration of an issue, and min­i­mize risk with deci­sions. How­ever, highly expe­ri­enced peo­ple tend to fall into the habits of the past. Once we have accu­mu­lated a valu­able base of knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence pro­vides a use­ful short­cut for deci­sion mak­ing. Rely­ing on expe­ri­ence is very fast and very effi­cient, but it is also poten­tially very dan­ger­ous. Oper­at­ing with the least effort pos­si­ble, the brain retrieves what­ever quickly seems to fit. We apply past pat­terns to the future. Rather than call upon its amaz­ing cre­ativ­ity, too often the brain works as noth­ing but a huge stor­age bin of precedents.

Because “close is good enough” as our brain fills in the blanks, we Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Bilder will dis­cuss Crowd­sourc­ing Big Brain Data: The 90% Solu­tion, at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Dr. Robert Bilder is the Chief of Med­ical Psy­chol­ogy — Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy and Direc­tor of the Ten­nen­baum Cen­ter for the Biol­ogy of Cre­ativ­ity in the Semel Insti­tute for Neu­ro­science and Human Behav­ior at UCLA.  He is the Michael E. Ten­nen­baum Fam­ily Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try & Biobe­hav­ioral Sci­ences, at the David Gef­fen School of Med­i­cine. Read the rest of this entry »

The CEO of Mar­bles: The Brain Store will pro­vide an overview of What Brain Games Con­sumers Buy (in Mar­bles’ stores) and Why, at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Lind­say started Mar­bles: The Brain Store in 2008 with the sim­ple idea of find­ing the best brain games out there and Read the rest of this entry »

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer your­self any direc­tion you choose.” — Oh The Places You’ll Go, Dr.Seuss.

The space between cre­ativ­ity and entre­pre­neur­ship is one of the most excit­ing areas unfold­ing in our mod­ern world right now. Read the rest of this entry »

A rare aha moment in 2011 set me chas­ing new problem-solving research. The study Ratio­nal Ver­sus Intu­itive Problem-Solving: How Think­ing ‘Off the Beaten Path’ Can Stim­u­late Cre­ativ­ity pub­lished in Psy­chol­ogy of Aes­thet­ics, Cre­ativ­ity, and the Arts stung me out of a spot of intel­lec­tual arro­gance. From my per­spec­tive, John Dewey’s 19th cen­tury step-wise Read the rest of this entry »

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on holis­tic brain health with clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist Dr. Paul Nuss­baum, author of Save Your Brain. You can learn more about the full Brain Fit­ness Q&A Series Here.

Per­haps one of the best exchanges was: Read the rest of this entry »