We’re hav­ing a good con­ver­sa­tion among Sharp­Brains Sum­mit par­tic­i­pants, prompted by the blog post Life­long brain well­ness and performance–not med­ical disease–drives grow­ing demand for dig­i­tal brain health solu­tions. In what is a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the need to see both the for­est and the trees Read the rest of this entry »

Over and over again—in nat­ural dis­as­ters, after the SARS epi­demic, fol­low­ing the loss of a child or spouse—Bonanno’s lon­gi­tu­di­nal stud­ies on loss and trauma revealed the exact same pat­tern at the pop­u­la­tion level. No mat­ter how bad the trauma, rates of PTSD never exceeded one-third, and rates of resilience were always found in at least one-third and never more than two-thirds of the population.

“This pat­tern of response is so ubiq­ui­tous, and so con­sis­tent, it begs the ques­tion: Why are we, as a species, designed this way?” asks Bonanno.

One pos­si­ble answer is that the design ensures that there is always at least a siz­able minor­ity, or even a major­ity, to take care of those deeply affected by a trauma. Read the rest of this entry »

If you believe most self-help books, pop-psychology arti­cles, and tele­vi­sion ther­a­pists, then you prob­a­bly assume that how peo­ple respond to sig­nif­i­cant life events is pretty pre­dictable.  Most of us, accord­ing to the “experts,” are affected in just about the same way by a given experience—there is a griev­ing process that every­one goes through, there is a sequence of events that hap­pens when we fall in love, there is a stan­dard response to being jilted, and there are fairly stan­dard ways almost every nor­mal per­son reacts to the birth of a child, to being unap­pre­ci­ated at one’s job, to hav­ing an unbear­able work­load, to the chal­lenges of rais­ing teenagers, and to the inevitable changes that occur with aging.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter).

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psychology

A review of Mar­tin Seligman’s lat­est book, Flour­ish: A Vision­ary New Under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it. He called for a psy­chol­ogy that would uncover what makes peo­ple cre­ative, resilient, opti­mistic, and, ulti­mately, happy. The “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy” move­ment was born.

Yet in his lat­est book, Flour­ish, Selig­man tries to pro­vide some­thing of a course cor­rec­tion for pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I just came back from an inspir­ing Gold­man Prize Award cer­e­mony, where seven grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal change­mak­ers were rec­og­nized for their work and resiliency, and shared their pas­sion and pur­pose with every­one attend­ing the event. We did hear too from Al Gore, Tracy Chap­man, Robert Red­ford, and the founder of the awards 20 years ago, Richard Goldman.

The BBC recently pub­lished an Op-Ed by Mr. Gold­man on the story behind the Awards them­selves: arti­cle Here. He explains how…

• - “One morn­ing in 1989, as I sat with my daily break­fast and news­pa­per, I read about the most recent Nobel lau­re­ates and won­dered if there was a com­pa­ra­ble award for envi­ron­men­tal work.”
• - “We asked a staff mem­ber at our foun­da­tion to do some research and he found that noth­ing yet existed to recog­nise envi­ron­men­tal work on an inter­na­tional stage, thus the Gold­man Prize was born.”
• - “Our choice to focus specif­i­cally on grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers was unique at the time.”

Mr. Gold­man, and the seven win­ners, are clearly help­ing improve the state of the world.

Now, the “state of the world” does include their very own brains — you may have seen this recent paper on how Vol­un­teer Pro­gram Pro­vides Health Ben­e­fits To Older Women

• - “She and her col­leagues found that EC vol­un­teers showed greater improve­ments in mem­ory and exec­u­tive func­tion than those who did not par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gram. In fact, the older adults with the low­est base­line per­for­mance in these areas — those most at risk for health dis­par­i­ties — demon­strated the most sig­nif­i­cant gains.”
• - “Both stud­ies high­lighted above show that every­day activ­ity inter­ven­tions (e.g., EC) can appeal to older adults’ desires to remain socially engaged and pro­duc­tive in their post-retirement years. Simul­ta­ne­ously, these activ­i­ties pro­vide mea­sur­able phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive health benefits.”

Of course, those ben­e­fits do not accrue only for older adults (or just for women), but may help all of us grad­u­ally build Cog­ni­tive Reserves through the added nov­elty, vari­ety and challenge.

Talk about win/ win!

Related arti­cles on social entrepreneurship:

“Every­one a Change­maker”, Ashoka and Google

Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture

For infor­ma­tion on the 2008 Con­fer­ence, and the dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers, visit: Learn­ing & The Brain Con­fer­ence: dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers.

The post below refers to the 2007 Conference:

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The orga­niz­ers of this amaz­ing con­fer­ence, whose reg­is­tra­tion is about to expire, just extended their very kind offer to Sharp­Brains read­ers: you can reg­is­ter at the reduced price of $475 (right now the nor­mal price is $545) if you do so by Feb­ru­ary 9nd. You can reg­is­ter here http://www.edupr.com/reg.html, mak­ing sure to write SharpBrains1 in the com­ments section

After the car­ni­val, which was fun but a bit of work, I will do an easy post…just came accross a good brief arti­cle on how a Coun­sel­ing cen­ter offers biofeed­back to help decrease stress.

We do see stress and anx­i­ety man­age­ment as inte­gral part of brain fit­ness. Some quotes from the article

- “The Savan­nah Col­lege of Art and Design Cen­ter for Stu­dent Coun­sel­ing and Dis­abil­ity Ser­vices offers stu­dents a unique oppor­tu­nity to decrease their stress lev­els — by using a biofeed­back machine called the Freeze-Framer.“
– “Col­lege stu­dents tend to have high lev­els of stress as a result of Read the rest of this entry »