Founder of Sharp­Brains talks about brain health (Salud­ify): “My pas­sion is learn­ing,” Fer­nan­dez told Salud­ify. “I love learn­ing, and I love to see other peo­ple learn. I just real­ized that if we can improve the way our brains work, in not just me but mil­lions of peo­ple, then we can help every­one learn bet­ter in every sin­gle decade of their lives.” …Fernandez’s work in the field led to the release of the book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness. The impe­tus behind the book came from Fer­nan­dez exam­in­ing pro­fes­sional research related to the brain’s learn­ing abil­ity and func­tion­al­ity at var­i­ous peri­ods of life.

“We thought the book would be per­fect to edu­cate peo­ple on this new under­stand­ing of the brain and equally impor­tant how to apply it to one­self, which is after all what peo­ple really want to do,” Fer­nan­dez said. “It’s what we call brain fit­ness. How peo­ple can main­tain their brains and minds in top shape.” Keep read­ing article

Often in dis­cussing health related find­ings with non-scientists, I’ve found that sci­en­tific lit­er­acy in the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion tends to be inad­e­quate for eval­u­at­ing sci­en­tific claims. A sur­pris­ing num­ber of peo­ple are reluc­tant to study sci­ence despite the poten­tial to ben­e­fit from the vast amount of use­ful knowl­edge being accu­mu­lated by sci­en­tists. Neil DeGrasse Tyson dis­cussed a sim­i­lar issue with the New York Daily News sev­eral years ago (A Cry to Pass the Sci­ence Test, 2006). In a time when sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion is con­stantly reshap­ing our under­stand­ing Read the rest of this entry »

Time for Sharp­Brains’ Novem­ber 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing lat­est sci­ence, tools and think­ing to upgrade brain health. Before we start, do you believe these 32 neu­romyths? Do we only use 10% of our brain?

New Sci­ence:

• Fast cycling can help Parkinson’s Dis­ease patients strengthen brain con­nec­tiv­ity for motor ability
• There’s no sin­gle sil­ver bul­let to treat depres­sion (not even aer­o­bic exercise)
• The cog­ni­tive and brain fit­ness ben­e­fits of being bilingual
• New­born neu­rons in the adult brain are crit­i­cal for learn­ing and memory
• Call­ing high school students/ teach­ers to design cre­ative exper­i­ments on the human brain

New Tools:

• Brain health cen­ters adding cog­ni­tive coach­ing services
• Study: Emerg­ing brain com­puter inter­face can mon­i­tor and train atten­tion in unmed­icated ADHD children
• 10–12 hours of med­i­ta­tion train­ing can improve daily-life emo­tional regulation
• On the lim­its of Citi­co­l­ine and the need for com­pre­hen­sive brain injury rehabilitation

New Think­ing:

• Do you believe these neu­romyths? Do we only use 10% of our brain?
• Smart pills as cog­ni­tive enhance­ment? Let’s first mon­i­tor neg­a­tive cog­ni­tive side-effects of com­mon medications
• Brains shape tech­nol­ogy as tech­nol­ogy shapes brains

Finally, a request to  reporters, ana­lysts and blog­gers read­ing this. As we’re prepar­ing to release a major mar­ket report, we’d like to ensure you are in our Media List. If you’re inter­ested in brain health & inno­va­tion and want to be noti­fied as soon as the report becomes avail­able, please Fill This Form and let us know a bit about the publication/s you are writ­ing for. Thank you!

Cour­tesy of the recent study Neu­romyths in edu­ca­tion: Preva­lence and pre­dic­tors of mis­con­cep­tions among teach­ers, by Sanne Dekker et al, here you have 32 brain-related state­ments. Are they cor­rect or incorrect?

1. We use our brains 24 h a day (C ).
2. Chil­dren must acquire their native lan­guage before a sec­ond lan­guage is learned. If they do not do so nei­ther lan­guage will be fully acquired (I).
3. Boys have big­ger brains than girls (C ). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

The Arrow­smith Pro­gram has agreed to become a Gold Spon­sor @ 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th): Opti­miz­ing Health through Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, Inno­va­tion and Data. Thank you!

The Arrow­smith Pro­gram,  avail­able in pub­lic and pri­vate schools in  the U.S. and Canada, is a com­pre­hen­sive suite of cog­ni­tive pro­grams for stu­dents with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties that tar­gets 19 areas of the brain that are most com­monly involved in learn­ing. The Arrow­smith Pro­gram iden­ti­fies and strength­ens the weak cog­ni­tive areas that affect learn­ing and each stu­dent works on cog­ni­tive pro­grams that are indi­vid­u­ally designed for his or her areas of learn­ing difficulty.

Please note that Bar­bara Arrowsmith-Young, the founder of the pro­gram whose back­ground story was described in the best­selling book The Brain That Changes Itself, by Nor­man Doidge, is releas­ing her own book this May.  Titled, The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. Learn More Here.

We are the archi­tects and builders of our own brains.

For mil­len­nia, how­ever, we were obliv­i­ous to our enor­mous cre­ative capa­bil­i­ties. We had no idea that our brains were chang­ing in response to our actions and atti­tudes, every day of our lives. So we uncon­sciously and ran­domly shaped our brains and our lat­ter years because we believed we had an immutable brain that was at the mercy of our genes.

Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. Read the rest of this entry »