With pharma exiting Alzheimer’s research, new hope (and urgency) seen in the combination of brain training and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)

___ What does the future hold for the war on Alzheimer’s? (The Globe and Mail): “After spend­ing huge sums on clin­i­cal trails in recent years, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try has failed to find a drug that can halt the mind-rob­bing dis­ease. And this month, Pfiz­er announced it is end­ing its Alzheimer’s research, although oth­er com­pa­nies haven’t thrown…

Read More

Fact: Lifelong neuroplasticity means our 7.5 billion brains can “sculpt” themselves

— Much ongo­ing brain health and brain enhance­ment inno­va­tion is enabled by the core fact—called neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty–that the human brain con­tin­u­al­ly changes itself through expe­ri­ence. Neuroplasticity–or brain plas­tic­i­ty– refers to the brain’s abil­i­ty to rewire itself based on expe­ri­ence by gen­er­at­ing new neu­rons and by form­ing new con­nec­tions between neu­rons, among oth­er fac­tors. It was believed for…

Read More

Witnessing an explosion of consumer-facing neurotechnologies to (potentially) harness lifelong neuroplasticity

— Last week I shared some key sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal and invest­ment trends rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing Brain Health, based on my par­tic­i­pa­tion at the 2016 Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit, and promised a sec­ond arti­cle more focused on the tech­nol­o­gy side of things. Here it is :-) Just a few weeks after the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit I also attend­ed CES 2017. While I enjoyed the myr­i­ad emerging…

Read More

Quick brain teasers to train your attention and working memory

— Here you have a few fun men­tal exer­cis­es to train your atten­tion and work­ing mem­o­ry (the capac­i­ty to hold mul­ti­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion in the mind, and to use them real-time). Giv­en them a try today and over the weekend…they are not as easy as they may sound! Say the days of the week back­wards, then in alphabetical…

Read More

Training Young Brains to Behave

Great arti­cle in the New York Times titled Train­ing Young Brains to Behave. A cou­ple of quotes: — “But just as biol­o­gy shapes behav­ior, so behav­ior can accel­er­ate biol­o­gy. And a small group of edu­ca­tion­al and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists now say that men­tal exer­cis­es of a cer­tain kind can teach chil­dren to become more self-pos­sessed at…

Read More