I like to think of myself as a pos­i­tive and opti­mistic per­son. It seems to me to make for an eas­ier and more enjoy­able jour­ney through life. So I was intrigued when I read of neu­ro­sci­en­tist Tali Sharot’s research into the Opti­mism Bias, which has shown that despite all the bad news sto­ries we are bom­barded with on a daily basis: war, vio­lence, wrong-doing and finan­cial melt­down, the major­ity of us are opti­mistic by nature; our brains are hard­wired to be so. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing con­cept and one I had to find out more about, so I bought the book and met with Tali in her office at Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Lon­don for an enthralling dis­cus­sion. Read the rest of this entry »

Penn Researchers Receive Major Grant to Explore Use of Brain Train­ing To Help Peo­ple Change Behav­iors that Increase Can­cer Risk (press release):

“Most peo­ple know that smok­ing, a bad diet, and phys­i­cal inac­tiv­ity can lead to cat­a­strophic per­sonal health con­se­quences, includ­ing can­cer. Yet mil­lions con­tinue to smoke, eat poorly, and fail to get enough exer­cise. A new project Read the rest of this entry »

NIOSH to Study Cog­ni­tive Loads on Under­ground Coal Min­ers (Occu­pa­tional Health & Safety):

“NIOSH has pub­lished a notice out­lin­ing an inter­est­ing study it plans to under­take to under­stand the cog­ni­tive demands placed on under­ground coal min­ers by new safety devices they must carry, with the indus­try increas­ingly deploy­ing wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems, per­sonal dust mon­i­tors, and prox­im­ity detectors…

The phys­i­cal bur­den is evi­dent, but the cog­ni­tive effect may not be as clear,” 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 »

Obe­sity linked to Cog­ni­tion (Health­Canal):

- “Obese peo­ple tend to per­form worse than healthy peo­ple at cog­ni­tive tasks like plan­ning ahead, a lit­er­a­ture review has found, con­clud­ing that psy­cho­log­i­cal tech­niques used to treat anorex­ics could help obese peo­ple too.” Read the rest of this entry »

Chart­ing Brain Growth in Humans and Chimps (New York Times):
– “Although baby humans and baby chim­panzees both start out with unde­vel­oped fore­brains, a new study reports that the human brain increases in vol­ume much more rapidly early on.“
– “The growth is in a region of the brain known as the pre­frontal cor­tex and is part of what makes humans cog­ni­tively advanced com­pared with other ani­mals, includ­ing the chim­panzee, our clos­est rel­a­tive. The pre­frontal cor­tex plays a major role in decision-making, self-awareness and cre­ative thinking.”

–> To learn more about study Dif­fer­en­tial Pre­frontal White Mat­ter Devel­op­ment in Chim­panzees and Humans: click Here (requires subscription).

–> To explore what may have hap­pened oth­er­wise, you may want to watch the new movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

A cou­ple of very inter­est­ing recent announce­ments show (in a mil­i­tary con­text) how well-targeted brain train­ing can com­ple­ment and aug­ment exist­ing approaches, both to help “nor­mal” and “clin­i­cal” pop­u­la­tions, in ways that silo-based, rear-mirror think­ing often misses: Read the rest of this entry »