The neu­ro­science of lan­guage, con­scious­ness, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion raises many fun­da­men­tal ques­tions, the answers to which con­sis­tently defy def­i­n­i­tion. For exam­ple: when we speak, where do our words come from? Our brain, or our mind? And what do we mean by mind? Sim­i­lar dilem­mas arise when we try to study the nature of con­scious­ness. What is it, and where is it? Is it gen­er­ated solely by neural activ­ity, or is it a sep­a­rate force that influ­ences the activ­ity of the brain? Hypothe­ses abound, but nobody seems to know for certain.

How­ever, we do have a few clues that illu­mi­nate the rela­tion­ship between the brain, the mind, and Read the rest of this entry »

The Sound of Music
Whether you real­ize it or not, you already know a lot when it comes to music. Accord­ing to Daniel Lev­itin, for­mer record pro­ducer, cur­rent neu­ro­sci­en­tist, psy­chol­o­gist and author of This Is Your Brain On Music, you know: Read the rest of this entry »

The frontal lobes of the brain (in gray here) have been com­pared to an orches­tra con­duc­tor, ­influ­enc­ing, direct­ing, and mod­er­at­ing many other brain func­tions. Indeed, the frontal lobes sup­port the so-called exec­u­tive func­tions: decision-making, problem-solving, plan­ning, inhibit­ing, as well as other high-level func­tions (social behav­ior, emo­tional con­trol, work­ing mem­ory, etc.). Ready for an exec­u­tive work­out? Read the rest of this entry »

My inter­est in the brain stems from want­ing to bet­ter under­stand both how to make school more palat­able for stu­dents, and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment more mean­ing­ful for fac­ulty. To that end, I began my Neu­rons Fir­ing blog in April, 2007, have been doing a lot of read­ing, and been attend­ing work­shops and con­fer­ences, includ­ing Learn­ing & the Brain.

If you agree that our brains are designed for learn­ing, then as edu­ca­tors it is incum­bent upon us to be look­ing for ways to max­i­mize the learn­ing process for each of our stu­dents, as well as for our­selves. Some of what fol­lows is sim­ply com­mon sense, but I’ve learned that all of it has a sci­en­tific basis in our brains. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: What fol­lows is an excerpt from Dr. Robert Sylwester’s new book, A Child’s Brain. The Need for Nur­ture (2010) Cor­win. In this excerpt, Robert Syl­wester syn­the­sizes the first 20 years of devel­op­ment and shows how it can be viewed as a “rhyth­mic four-six-four-six-year devel­op­men­tal sequence”)

.

Chap­ter 4: Devel­op­ment and Growth.

The First 20 years.

The July/ August 2009 issue of The Jour­nal on Active Aging includes my arti­cle Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It“

An excerpt:

“By now you have prob­a­bly heard about brain plas­tic­ity, the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. The lat­est sci­en­tific research shows that spe­cific lifestyles and actions can improve the health and level of func­tion­ing of our brains, no mat­ter our age.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to main­tain­ing cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing through life are the hip­pocam­pus (deep inside the brain, part of what is called the lim­bic sys­tem), which plays a role in learn­ing and mem­ory; and the frontal lobes (behind your fore­head), which are key to main­tain­ing decision-making and auton­omy. Is there a way to phys­i­cally pro­tect these parts of the aging brain? Yes. But the right answer is far from “do one more cross­word puz­zle” or “do more X” (what­ever X is). The key is to add sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties to ensure a flow of nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge, com­bin­ing phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise while not ignor­ing fac­tors such as stress man­age­ment and bal­anced nutrition.

We need, in other words, to retool our under­stand­ing and prac­tice of “Use it or lose it.” We must focus on the impor­tance of get­ting out of our phys­i­cal and men­tal rou­tines and activ­i­ties to get the ben­e­fits of real exercise—physical and mental.”

Con­tinue read­ing Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It”

Here you have the pre­sen­ta­tion I deliv­ered on Tues­day at ETech 2009 (this year’s O’Reilly Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy Conference):

Emerg­ing Research and Tech­nol­ogy for Life Hacking/ Brain Training

(click to open pre­sen­ta­tion in new window)

Descrip­tion: Life hack­ing. Brain train­ing. They are one and the same. The brain’s frontal lobes enable our goal-oriented behav­ior, sup­port­ing exec­u­tive func­tions, such as decision-making, atten­tion, emo­tional self-regulation, goal-setting, and work­ing mem­ory. These func­tions can be enhanced with tar­geted prac­tice  such as life hack­ing. This ses­sion will pro­vide an overview of the cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science under­pin­ning life hack­ing, and review the state-of-the-art of non-invasive tools for brain train­ing: neu­ro­feed­back, biofeed­back, soft­ware appli­ca­tions, cog­ni­tive sim­u­la­tions, Tran­scra­nial Mag­netic Stim­u­la­tion, and plain-old meditation.

It was great to meet fel­low blog­gers and pre­sen­ters, such as Shel­ley Batts of Of Two Minds and Chris Patil of Ouroboros, and very inquisite and through­ful audi­ence mem­bers. Get­ting ready to speak at ASA/ NCOA and IHRSA next week!