As school is about to resume, peo­ple are reminded of their strong opin­ions about how to fix schools: more fund­ing, bet­ter teach­ers, less gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, more gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, etc. But the one obvi­ous, and never-stated prob­lem, is that stu­dents don’t remem­ber what they are taught. In spite of all the “teach­ing to the test” that par­ents and teach­ers com­plain about, stu­dents still don’t remem­ber the very things they were taught as answers to test questions.

The rea­son they don’t remem­ber is that they are not taught how to mem­o­rize. Why is that? Read the rest of this entry »

Google chang­ing how humans think (Cana­dian Business):

- “…the psy­chol­o­gists con­cluded that our reliance on the Inter­net has affected how we relate to information—instead of remem­ber­ing the infor­ma­tion itself, we just remem­ber where to find it.”

- “While the move from know­ing infor­ma­tion to know­ing where to find it has many benefits—including free­ing up your brain for more rea­son­ing and ana­lyt­i­cal thinking—there’s a down­side too.” Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I just came back from an inspir­ing Gold­man Prize Award cer­e­mony, where seven grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal change­mak­ers were rec­og­nized for their work and resiliency, and shared their pas­sion and pur­pose with every­one attend­ing the event. We did hear too from Al Gore, Tracy Chap­man, Robert Red­ford, and the founder of the awards 20 years ago, Richard Goldman.

The BBC recently pub­lished an Op-Ed by Mr. Gold­man on the story behind the Awards them­selves: arti­cle Here. He explains how…

• - “One morn­ing in 1989, as I sat with my daily break­fast and news­pa­per, I read about the most recent Nobel lau­re­ates and won­dered if there was a com­pa­ra­ble award for envi­ron­men­tal work.”
• - “We asked a staff mem­ber at our foun­da­tion to do some research and he found that noth­ing yet existed to recog­nise envi­ron­men­tal work on an inter­na­tional stage, thus the Gold­man Prize was born.”
• - “Our choice to focus specif­i­cally on grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers was unique at the time.”

Mr. Gold­man, and the seven win­ners, are clearly help­ing improve the state of the world.

Now, the “state of the world” does include their very own brains — you may have seen this recent paper on how Vol­un­teer Pro­gram Pro­vides Health Ben­e­fits To Older Women

• - “She and her col­leagues found that EC vol­un­teers showed greater improve­ments in mem­ory and exec­u­tive func­tion than those who did not par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gram. In fact, the older adults with the low­est base­line per­for­mance in these areas — those most at risk for health dis­par­i­ties — demon­strated the most sig­nif­i­cant gains.”
• - “Both stud­ies high­lighted above show that every­day activ­ity inter­ven­tions (e.g., EC) can appeal to older adults’ desires to remain socially engaged and pro­duc­tive in their post-retirement years. Simul­ta­ne­ously, these activ­i­ties pro­vide mea­sur­able phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive health benefits.”

Of course, those ben­e­fits do not accrue only for older adults (or just for women), but may help all of us grad­u­ally build Cog­ni­tive Reserves through the added nov­elty, vari­ety and challenge.

Talk about win/ win!

Related arti­cles on social entrepreneurship:

“Every­one a Change­maker”, Ashoka and Google

Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture

Today we’ll dis­cuss some of the cog­ni­tive impli­ca­tions of “always on” work­places and lifestyles via a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Mag­gie Jack­son, an award-winning author and jour­nal­ist. Her lat­est book, Dis­tracted: The Ero­sion of Atten­tion and the Com­ing Dark Age, describes the impli­ca­tions of our busy work and life envi­ron­ments and offers impor­tant reflec­tions to help us thrive in them.

This is a 2-part inter­view con­ducted via e-mail: we will pub­lish the con­tin­u­a­tion on Thurs­day March 12th.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: New York Times colum­nist David Brooks said last year that we live in a Cog­ni­tive Age, and encour­aged read­ers to be aware of this change and try and adapt to the new real­ity. Can you explain the cog­ni­tive demands of today’s work­places that weren’t there 30–40 years ago?

Mag­gie Jack­son: Our work­places have changed enor­mously in recent decades, and it’s easy to point to the Black­berry or the lap­top as the sources of our cul­ture of speed and over­load and dis­trac­tion. But it’s impor­tant to note first that our 24/7, frag­mented work cul­ture has deeper roots. With the first high-tech inven­tions, such as the cin­ema, phono­graph, tele­graph, rail, and car, came rad­i­cal changes in human expe­ri­ence of time and space. Dis­tance was shat­tered  long before email and red-eye flights. Tele­graph oper­a­tors  not online daters  expe­ri­enced the first vir­tual love affairs, as evi­denced by the 1890s novel Wired Love. Now, we wres­tle with the effects of changes seeded long ago.

Today, the cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal demands on work­ers are steep. Con­sider 24/7 liv­ing. At great cost to our health, we oper­ate in a sleep­less, hur­ried world, ignor­ing cues of sun and sea­son, the Indus­trial Age inven­tions of the week­end and vaca­tion, and the rhythms of biol­ogy. We try to break the fet­ters of time and live like per­pet­ual motion machines. That’s one rea­son why we feel over­loaded and stressed con­di­tions that are cor­ro­sive to problem-solving and clear thinking.

At the same time, our tech­nolo­gies allow us access to mil­lions of infor­ma­tion bites pro­duc­ing an abun­dance of data that is both won­drous and dan­ger­ous. Unless we have the will, dis­ci­pline and frame­works for turn­ing this infor­ma­tion into wis­dom, we remain stuck on the sur­face of Read the rest of this entry »

A recent CNN arti­cle explains well why a grow­ing num­ber of com­pa­nies use brain­teasers and logic puz­zles of a type called “guessti­ma­tions” dur­ing job interviews:

- “Seem­ingly ran­dom ques­tions like these have become com­mon­place in Sil­i­con Val­ley and other tech out­posts, where com­pa­nies aren’t as inter­ested in the cor­rect answer to a tough ques­tion as they are in how a prospec­tive employee might try to solve it. Since busi­nesses today have to be able to react quickly to shift­ing mar­ket dynam­ics, they want more than engi­neers with high IQs and good col­lege tran­scripts. They want peo­ple who can think on their feet.”

What are tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies (Google, Microsoft, Ama­zon) and con­sult­ing com­pa­nies (McK­in­sey, Boston Con­sult­ing Group, Accen­ture…) look­ing for? They want employ­ees with good so-called Exec­u­tive Func­tions: problem-solving, cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­ity, plan­ning, work­ing mem­ory, decision-making, even emo­tional self-regulation (don’t try to solve one of these puz­zles while being angry, or stressed out).

Want to try a few? Below you have our Top 7 Guesstimations/ Logic Puz­zles for Brain Challenge:

Please try to GUESS the answers to the ques­tions below based on your own log­i­cal approach. The goal is not to find out (or Google) the right answer, but to Read the rest of this entry »

As promised in my pre­vi­ous post on Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and Brain Plas­tic­ity in Adult Brains, I will now list some inter­views, video, arti­cles, and books that go hand-in-hand with these fas­ci­nat­ing top­ics we are dis­cussing. Please com­ment below if you have favorite addi­tional resources!

NEUROGENESIS

MIT news – Picower researcher finds neu­ron growth in adult brain

Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science brain brief – Adult Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis

BRAIN PLASTICITY

Neu­ro­science for Kids – Brain Plas­tic­ity: What Is It?

Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science brain brief – Brain Plas­tic­ity, Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing and Reading

Brain Sci­ence Pod­cast – Gin­ger Camp­bell inter­view with Nor­man Doidge, MD, Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to the 30th edi­tion of Med­i­cine 2.0, the blog car­ni­val devoted to arti­cles that ana­lyze the cur­rent and poten­tial impact of web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies on med­i­cine and healthcare.

“Med­i­cine 2.0″ 101

The first ques­tion is, of course, “What exactly is Med­i­cine 2.0?”. The sec­ond, “Who cares?”. The third, “Why?”

Anthro­pol­o­gists are here to help. Who bet­ter to help under­stand emerg­ing arti­facts of the health and med­ical tribe, as evi­denced by the fan­tas­tic lec­ture An Anthro­po­log­i­cal Intro­duc­tion To Youtube given to the Library of Con­gress by Pro­fes­sor Michael Wesch. As Open Think­ing sug­gests, the video which is 55 min­utes long pro­vides an “excel­lent back­grounder on social media, user-generated con­tent, and online com­mu­ni­ties through the lens of anthropology.”

If you are more the Pow­er­Point type, you can access the great slide pre­sen­ta­tion and list of web­sites pro­vided by eHealth: see Web 2.0 in Clin­i­cal Research.

The Future of Med­i­cine and Health 2.0

Admit­tedly, the Med­i­cine 2.0 field is still small and emerg­ing. But, how will it grow? What new health­care out­comes will it enable and sup­port? What may be the trade-offs to con­sider, if any? Read the rest of this entry »