Let us share below a list of 40 com­mon brain fit­ness, brain health, brain train­ing ques­tions that we will make sure to address dur­ing the upcom­ing online course, How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012 (starts March 7th). The ques­tions are sequenced by their approx­i­mate order of appear­ance in the syl­labus. We look for­ward to an engag­ing, inter­ac­tive and valu­able expe­ri­ence! ***Please remem­ber that course reg­is­tra­tion ends on Sun­day, March 4th.***

Top 40 Brain Fit­ness & Train­ing Questions

1. How can one define brain fitness
2. What is link between stress, focus and memory
3. Does “brain age” even exist
4. How to enhance over­all men­tal pro­duc­tiv­ity, vs just IQ
5. Is there some “ceil­ing” to my improve­ment or can I always try more things
6. How brain func­tions evolve with age. What improves, what declines, what should I be pay­ing atten­tion to Read the rest of this entry »

Only a cou­ple weeks ago we announced the new online course How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012, and we are happy to report 61 life­long learn­ers have reg­is­tered since. Take a look at the fas­ci­nat­ing geo­graphic dis­tri­b­u­tion of par­tic­i­pants! We are look­ing for­ward to it.

You may have  noticed that Amazon.com is shar­ing aggre­gated data on how ebook read­ers inter­act with the books they are read­ing. For exam­ple, the “Pop­u­lar High­lights” sec­tion (towards the bot­tom of our Kin­dle book page) ranks the Top 10 sen­tences that Kin­dle read­ers have high­lighted and shared while read­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp (April 2009; 182 pages; ranked #1 in Kin­dle Store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine section).

This infor­ma­tion is invalu­able to authors and pub­lish­ers - as you can imag­ine, we’ll make sure to not only main­tain but to elab­o­rate on these top­ics as we pre­pare future edi­tions of the book.

So, what are so far the Top Ten Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, Read the rest of this entry »

In a now well-known 1993 paper in Nature called “Music and spa­tial task per­for­mance”, Frances H. Rauscher and her col­leagues report that par­tic­i­pants who were exposed to the first move­ment “alle­gro con spir­ito” of the Mozart Sonata KV 448 for Two Pianos in D major scored sig­nif­i­cantly higher on stan­dard­ized tests of abstract/spatial rea­son­ing abil­ity than those who were instructed to relax or those who just sat there in silence.

Even though the par­tic­i­pants in Rauscher et al.‘s study were col­lege stu­dents, and they didn’t admin­is­ter a full bat­tery of cog­ni­tive tests to prop­erly assess gen­eral intel­li­gence, their find­ings trans­lated into “play Mozart to your chil­dren and they will grow up smart.” A cot­tage indus­try was born. Read the rest of this entry »

Any­one who knows me knows that my favorite pas­time is nap­ping. In Col­lege, I would come back to my dorm room, and like clock­work, would take a nap. My best friend in Eng­land, who got quite a kick out of my pas­sion for nap­ping, once tried to per­suade me to drink a cup of tea after lunch instead of tak­ing my cus­tom­ary nap. I really tried, but I soon gave in to my nap crav­ings. Some­times I feel like I really need to re-charge my brain batteries.

Well, now sci­ence is on my side. I just love this new study, which was pre­sented by Matthew Walker, assis­tant pro­fes­sor at UC Berke­ley, at the annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of the Advance­ment of Sci­ence (AAAS) con­fer­ence in San Diego this past Sun­day (Feb. 2010).

Walker and his col­leagues Bryce A. Man­der and Sangeetha San­thanam split up a batch of 39 healthy young adults into two groups. One group napped, the other did not.

At noon, both groups took a learn­ing task thought to recruit the hip­pocam­pus. The hip­pocam­pus is a region of the brain known to play an impor­tant role in the for­ma­tion of new mem­o­ries. Over the past few years, var­i­ous researchers have found that fact-based mem­o­ries are tem­porar­ily stored in the hip­pocam­pus before other regions of the brain can oper­ate on the con­tent, espe­cially the regions of the brain respon­si­ble for higher-order rea­son­ing and think­ing.  At this point in the exper­i­ment, both groups showed sim­i­lar lev­els of performance.

Then, at 2pm, the nap group took a 90-minute nap while the no-nap group stayed awake, pre­sum­ably watch­ing the nap group enjoy­ing their nap. After nap-time both groups then took more learn­ing tests. The nap­pers did bet­ter on the tasks than those who stayed awake, demon­strat­ing their higher capac­ity to learn. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask your­self the tough ques­tions: Do you mind your brain? Do you know your nog­gin’? Can you claim cere­bral own­er­ship or is your men­tal a rental?

Although these ques­tions are rel­e­vant at vir­tu­ally all lifes­pan stages, firm answers can some­times appear incon­ceiv­able.  Unfor­tu­nately with advanc­ing age, atten­tion to men­tal per­for­mance is often either aban­doned or framed in terms of per­ceived impair­ment and decline.  Now, I have pre­vi­ously shared my mes­sage on mind­ing the aging brain with Sharp­Brains read­ers.  As a cog­ni­tive neu­ropsy­chi­a­trist pri­mar­ily inter­ested in later-life phe­nom­ena, I tend to stick to my area of exper­tise.  Nev­er­the­less, whether you are elder or not, I implore you to take these ideas to heart…do you mind?

Just as brain fit­ness is for all, aging is sim­i­larly uni­ver­sal.  Every thought­ful indi­vid­ual rec­og­nizes the unavoid­able answer to “are you aging?”  How­ever, the answer to “how are you aging?” is less obvi­ous to most, and is even more obscure when con­sid­er­ing lifes­pan cog­ni­tive tra­jec­to­ries.  In fact, no con­sen­sus lex­i­con yet exists to describe the ways in which cog­ni­tion can be mod­u­lated to achieve desired lifestyle or clin­i­cal goals.

In my lat­est pub­li­ca­tion on technology-enabled cog­ni­tive train­ing for healthy elders, I out­line a pro­posed lex­i­con for pos­i­tive cog­ni­tion inter­ven­tions, as well as a frame­work for clas­si­fy­ing puta­tive ben­e­fits of cog­ni­tive train­ing.  Here, I will present these con­cepts with­out regard to age, as they apply equally well to all sapi­ent sapi­ens:

●      Cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion refers to non­tar­geted engage­ment that gen­er­ally enhances men­tal func­tion­ing.  Exam­ples might include edu­ca­tional endeav­ors or life review.

●      Cog­ni­tive train­ing refers to theory-driven inter­ven­tion, Read the rest of this entry »

For an excel­lent review of the most recent find­ings on learn­ing habits, check out The New York Times recent arti­cle: For­get What You Know About Good Study Habits. Tons of unex­pected and fas­ci­nat­ing results!

The find­ings can help any­one, from a fourth grader doing long divi­sion to a retiree tak­ing on a new lan­guage. But they directly con­tra­dict much of the com­mon wis­dom about good study habits, and they have not caught on. For instance, instead of stick­ing to one study loca­tion, sim­ply alter­nat­ing the room where a per­son stud­ies improves retention.

Take the notion that chil­dren have spe­cific learn­ing styles, that some are “visual learn­ers” and oth­ers are audi­tory; some are “left-brain” stu­dents, oth­ers “right-brain.” In a recent review of the rel­e­vant research, pub­lished in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est, a team of psy­chol­o­gists found almost zero sup­port for such ideas.

Com­ment: The way we learn mat­ters for two rea­sons: a) we need to effi­ciently retain some infor­ma­tion for the var­i­ous tasks we have to per­form every day, but also b) learn­ing induces neu­ro­plas­tic changes in the brain, which  in turn may increase our brain reserve and brain health (see our prior arti­cle on Brain Plas­tic­ity: How learn­ing changes your brain).