As the pres­i­dent and med­ical direc­tor of the Alzheimer’s Research and Pre­ven­tion Foun­da­tion (ARPF), it’s my job to stay on top of advances in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Recently, a num­ber of arti­cles in the med­ical lit­er­a­ture have caught my atten­tion. They are focused on a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion that con­cerns most Baby Boomers like me: “Is mem­ory loss just a nor­mal part of aging?” Read the rest of this entry »

Spon­sored Ad (How to Adver­tise on SharpBrains.com)

Time for our monthly eNewslet­ter track­ing recent news and devel­op­ments on how the neu­ro­science of cog­ni­tion and emo­tions can inform edu­ca­tion and health across the lifes­pan. Let us try to be as con­cise as pos­si­ble, so you can spend as much time as pos­si­ble con­nect­ing with your Loved Ones instead of with the World Wide Web.

• Your Brain: Capa­ble of Great­ness, Hard-wired for Survival
• How Phys­i­cal Exer­cise Ben­e­fits the Brain
• Brain changes seen in cab­bies who take ‘The Knowledge’
• How Cul­tural Evo­lu­tion Out­paces Nat­ural Evolution
• Cog­ni­tive Test­ing Pro­gram Fails Sol­diers, Leav­ing Brain Injuries Undetected
• Cog­ni­tive Behav­iour Ther­apy Helps Adults with ADHD
• Check­list to Eval­u­ate Brain Train­ing and Brain Health Claims
• Could study­ing the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
• New Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012
• The Sharp­Brains Guide: Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine Best­seller in Ama­zon Kin­dle Store
• Offi­cial selec­tion  by AARP of Best Books on Brain Fitness
• Top 10 Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neurogenesis
• Invi­ta­tion for Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Par­tic­i­pants to Com­ment on Meet­ing Report

Wish­ing you a won­der­ful end of 2011 and a happy and suc­cess­ful 2012!

PS: thirty-nine peo­ple have reg­is­tered since this past Tues­day to par­tic­i­pate in the upcom­ing Online Course: How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach in 2012. Please remem­ber we will only be able to acco­mo­date the first two hun­dred reg­is­trants, so please take a look soon to see if you are inter­ested in joining!

We just noticed that The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice, and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp has become #1 book in Ama­zon Kin­dle store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine sec­tion, #1 in Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy sec­tion, and #2 in Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­ogy section.

To learn more and order book in sev­eral stores (Ama­zon, Barnes & Noble, Smash­words) & coun­tries (USA, Canada, UK, Ger­many, France, Spain, Italy), please click Here.

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 »

Given the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, we are pleased to host this thought-provoking arti­cle by 2 of our Expert Con­trib­u­tors. Dear Mr or Mrs Next Pres­i­dent: how can you help our minds take bet­ter care of our brains?

————–

Ask Not What The Health Sys­tem Can Do For You…

– By Simon J. Evans, PhD and Paul R. Burghardt, PhD.

With the pres­i­den­tial debates gear­ing up again we are sure to hear more about health care. But we pro­pose a slightly dif­fer­ent ques­tion. In addi­tion to ask­ing how we can get more peo­ple health­care cov­er­age, we should also ask why so many peo­ple are sick in the first place.

The words of John Kennedy might today be, “Ask not what the health care sys­tem can do for you. Ask what you can do to reduce the health care bur­den”. But before delv­ing into what we can do, let’s take a look at some real­i­ties that our next pres­i­dent could face in their first ‘State of the Union’ address.

Read the rest of this entry »

What a busy week, last one. We will be writ­ing dur­ing the week about some of the Sharp­Brains events that occured. 

The May/June Issue of Stan­ford Mag­a­zine has a nice sec­tion titled Just One Ques­tion, where a num­ber of Stan­ford alumni answer the ques­tion “What do peo­ple in your pro­fes­sion know that you wish every­one knew?”

Some of our favorite answers:

• Zoe Lof­gren, ’70, rep­re­sents California’s 16th dis­trict in Con­gress. “When all is said and done, the Amer­i­can peo­ple decide the kind of Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment they get. It’s largely a myth that elected offi­cials dis­re­gard the view­points of their con­stituents. That only hap­pens when vot­ers forgo the oppor­tu­nity to express their point of view or when an elected offi­cial (know­ingly or not) is prepar­ing to leave his or her elected office. A dozen unscripted, indi­vid­ual let­ters on a sub­ject are enough to gal­va­nize a mem­ber of Con­gress rep­re­sent­ing 670,000 people.”
• Doug Osheroff, the J.G. Jack­son and C.J. Wood Pro­fes­sor of Physics, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996. “I wish that more peo­ple had an under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of how sci­ence is done. That is, how sci­en­tists are able to expand the bound­aries of our knowl­edge and at the same time develop new tech­niques and tech­nolo­gies that really do ben­e­fit mankind.”
• Spencer Sher­man, MA ’69, PhD ’71, is a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist in Santa Bar­bara, Calif. “Psy­chother­a­pists know that it’s okay to be not okay. That every­one suf­fers some­times. That suf­fer­ing is not unend­ing, unen­durable or with­out value. That con­fu­sion and despair have mean­ing, and that out of them wis­dom and com­pas­sion emerge. That help exists and that it is sage to ask for it. That strength can be built and hap­pi­ness learned. That tri­als and mis­takes are nec­es­sary parts of that learn­ing. That there is no life free from pain. That it is the pain that dri­ves the growth. That flow­ers thank the soil from which they rise.”
• (we are biased here) Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, MBA ’01, MA ’02, is CEO and co-founder of Sharp­Brains, Inc. “Many cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists wish that more peo­ple knew how flex­i­ble our brains are through­out our whole lives and what a big dif­fer­ence we can make to ensure a healthy, fit, brain and mind. We can exer­cise our brains—not just our biceps.”

You can check more answers to Just One Ques­tion.