In an increas­ingly knowledge-based and innovation-driven econ­omy, human brains—not finan­cial capital—are becom­ing the pri­mary dri­vers of busi­ness suc­cess. Engaged, cre­ative cit­i­zens and work­ers mean the dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and fail­ure at the orga­ni­za­tional and soci­etal levels.

Look­ing at the prob­lem from the per­spec­tive of brain health, there are Read the rest of this entry »

Once the 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012) was over, we sent all par­tic­i­pants an anony­mous online sur­vey ask­ing for feed­back; we also requested brief quotes to help con­vey the value of the Summit.

The chart to the left show­cases the high lev­els of sat­is­fac­tion with the Sum­mit Over­all. And below you can read a num­ber of state­ments by participants.

“The Sharp­Brains Sum­mit is a rare vehi­cle for get­ting mul­ti­ple expert per­spec­tives on cur­rent devel­op­ments in improv­ing brain func­tion in a con­cise and clear way. The Sum­mit is a valu­able resource for both experts and non-experts.”  - Dr. Michael Pos­ner, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus, Uni­ver­sity of Oregon

“The 2012 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit was fan­tas­tic– it is clear that we are mov­ing into a new phase in study­ing human per­for­mance using big data. Our bod­ies are out­liv­ing our brains– what we need most now is evidence-driven design to develop appli­ca­tions to help our brains remain as strong as our bod­ies! Fan­tas­tic con­fer­ence, can’t wait for next year!” - Sheryl Flynn PT, PhD, CEO, Blue Mar­ble Games Keep Read­ing »

IBMT linked with pos­i­tive struc­tural changes in brain con­nec­tiv­ity (News Medical):

- “A Texas Tech Uni­ver­sity sci­en­tist study­ing the Chi­nese mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion known as inte­gra­tive body-mind train­ing (IBMT) said he and other researchers have con­firmed and expanded on changes in struc­tural effi­ciency of white mat­ter in the brain that can be related to pos­i­tive behav­ioral changes in sub­jects prac­tic­ing the tech­nique for a month and a min­i­mum of 11 hours total.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pos­ner will pro­vide an update on lat­est research and appli­ca­tions to develop brain net­works and self-control, at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Michael Pos­ner is Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon and Adjunct Pro­fes­sor at the Weill Med­ical Col­lege in New York (Sack­ler Insti­tute). He is cur­rently engaged in a project with Mary K. Roth­bart to under­stand the devel­op­ment Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has recently pub­lished sev­eral very good and seem­ingly unre­lated articles…let’s try and con­nect some dots. What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­ogy in lit­er­ally mind­less ways? What if the Edu­ca­tion of the Future (some­times also referred to as “21st Cen­tury Skills”) wasn’t so much about the How we edu­cate but about the What we want stu­dents to learn and develop, apply­ing what we know about mind and brain to the needs they are likely to face dur­ing the next 50–70 years of their lives? Read the rest of this entry »

Excel­lent arti­cle in the New York Times on learn­ing, self-regulation and exec­u­tive fuunctions:

The School Issue: Preschool: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? (New York Times)

- “Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among schol­ars and sci­en­tists who study early-childhood devel­op­ment, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the board­room than the class­room: exec­u­tive func­tion. Orig­i­nally a neu­ro­science term, it refers to the abil­ity to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process infor­ma­tion in a coher­ent way, to hold rel­e­vant details in your short-term mem­ory, to avoid dis­trac­tions and men­tal traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gists have come to believe that exec­u­tive func­tion, and specif­i­cally the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vex­ing ques­tions in edu­ca­tion today.”

- “The abil­ity of young chil­dren to con­trol their emo­tional and cog­ni­tive impulses, it turns out, is a remark­ably strong indi­ca­tor of both short-term and long-term suc­cess, aca­d­e­mic and otherwise.”

A truly excel­lent arti­cle, highly rec­om­mended read­ing. The only aspect lack­ing is the absence of coverage/ analy­sis of training-based alter­na­tives to devel­op­ing self-regulation, such as med­i­ta­tion and com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing, which can help address some of the issues raised in the arti­cle (lim­ited scal­a­bil­ity, dif­fi­culty in iso­lat­ing influ­en­tial vari­ables). We cov­ered this in-depth in our book inter­view with Michael Posner.

Arts edu­ca­tion influ­ences learn­ing and other areas of cog­ni­tion and may deserve a more promi­nent place in schools, accord­ing to a wave of recent neu­ro­science research.One recent study found that chil­dren who receive music instruc­tion for just 15 months show strength­ened con­nec­tions in musi­cally rel­e­vant brain areas and per­form bet­ter on asso­ci­ated tasks, com­pared with stu­dents who do not learn an instrument.

A sep­a­rate study found that chil­dren who receive train­ing to improve their focus and atten­tion per­form bet­ter not only on atten­tion tasks but also on intel­li­gence tests. Some researchers sug­gest that arts train­ing might sim­i­larly affect a wide range of cog­ni­tive domains. Edu­ca­tors and neu­ro­sci­en­tists gath­ered recently in Bal­ti­more and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to dis­cuss the increas­ingly detailed pic­ture of how arts edu­ca­tion changes the brain, and how to trans­late that research to edu­ca­tion pol­icy and the class­room. Many par­tic­i­pants referred to the results of Dana Foundation-funded research by cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists from seven lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties over three years, released in 2008.

“Art must do some­thing to the mind and brain. What is that? How would we be able to detect that? asked Barry Gor­don, a behav­ioral neu­rol­o­gist and cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity, who spoke May 8 dur­ing the “Learn­ing and the Brain” con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Art, I sub­mit to you with­out absolute proof, can improve the power of our minds. How­ever, this improve­ment is hard to detect.”

Study links music, brain changes

Among the sci­en­tists try­ing to detect such improve­ment, Ellen Win­ner, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at Boston Col­lege, and Got­tfried Schlaug, a pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy at Beth Israel Dea­coness Med­ical Cen­ter and Har­vard Med­ical School, pre­sented research at the “Learn­ing, Arts, and the Brain sum­mit May 6 in Bal­ti­more. Their work mea­sured, for the first time, changes to the brain as a result of music training.

For four years, Win­ner and Schlaug fol­lowed chil­dren ages 9 to 11, some of whom Read the rest of this entry »