We often talk in this blog about how to expand fun­da­men­tal abil­i­ties or cog­ni­tive func­tions, like atten­tion, or mem­ory, or emo­tional self-regulation. Think of them as mus­cles one can train. Now, it is also impor­tant to think of ways one can use our exist­ing mus­cles more efficiently.

Let’s talk about how to man­age bet­ter the over­whelm­ing amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able these days.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of new books, ana­lyst reports, sci­en­tific papers pub­lished every year. Mil­lions of web­sites at our googletips. The flow of data, infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge is grow­ing expo­nen­tially, stretch­ing the capac­ity of our not-so-evolved brains. We can com­plain all day that we can­not process ALL this flow. Now, let me ask, should we even try?

Prob­a­bly not. Why engage in a los­ing propo­si­tion. Instead, let me offer a few strate­gies that can help man­age this flow of infor­ma­tion better.

1. Pri­or­i­tize: strate­gic con­sult­ing firms such as McK­in­sey and BCG train their staff in the so-called 80/20 rule: 80% of effects are caused by the top 20% of causes. In a com­pany, 80% sales may come from 20% of the accounts. Impli­ca­tion: focus on that top 20%; don’t spend too much time on the 80% that only account for 20%.

2. Lever­age a sci­en­tific mind­set. Sci­en­tists shift through tons of data in effi­cient, goal-oriented ways. How do they do it? By first stat­ing a hypoth­e­sis and then look­ing for data. For exam­ple, an untrained per­son could spend weeks “boil­ing the ocean”, try­ing to read as much as pos­si­ble, in a very frag­men­tary way, about how phys­i­cal exer­cise affects our brain. A trained sci­en­tist would first define clear hypothe­ses and pre­lim­i­nary assump­tions, such as “Phys­i­cal exer­cise can enhance the brain’s abil­ity to gen­er­ate new neu­rons” or “Those new neu­rons appear in the hip­pocam­pus”, and then look specif­i­cally for data that cor­rob­o­rates or refutes those sen­tences, enabling him or her to refine the hypothe­ses fur­ther, based on accu­mu­lated knowl­edge, in a vir­tu­ous learn­ing cycle.

Very intense week, and very fun. I will be writ­ing more about this week’s 3 speak­ing events, but let me say now that our key messages

1) our brains remain flex­i­ble dur­ing our lifetimes,

2) we can refine our brains with tar­geted practice,

3) good brain exer­cise, or “men­tal cross-training”, requires nov­elty, vari­ety, and increas­ing level of chal­lenge (but with­out cre­at­ing too much stress),

are being very well accepted from both healthy aging and work­place pro­duc­tiv­ity points of view. We have ONE brain: health and pro­duc­tiv­ity are 2 sides of the same coin.

If you want to make sure we learn more about our brains, you can help fel­low blog­ger Shel­ley Batts get a col­lege schol­ar­ship by voting here. She has a great neu­ro­science blog, is now final­ist in a com­pe­ti­tion to win a nice schol­ar­ship, and needs out help.

Have some more time? You can watch this excellent 90-second video of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist Dr Lisa Sak­sida doing yoga in front of the fire while explain­ing the nature of Brain and Mind (via Mind­Hacks). Quotes:

“I wish peo­ple under­stood that there is no mind/brain dual­ity. Specif­i­cally, I wish peo­ple under­stood that there is no such thing as a purely psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der. Every event in your psy­cho­log­i­cal life, and there­fore every psy­cho­log­i­cal change, is reducible in the­ory to events and changes in your brain. We should there­fore not judge peo­ple dif­fer­ently, accord­ing to whether they are con­sid­ered to have a ‘psy­cho­log­i­cal’ as opposed to a ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal’ problem.”

“Of course, a lack of mind/brain split does not mean that we should aban­don all talk of psy­chol­ogy. Psy­chol­ogy and neu­ro­science are two ways of study­ing the same thing, and both are essen­tial for under­stand­ing the human condition.”

For more, check the posts in these always great blog car­ni­vals (selected col­lec­tions of blog posts by a num­ber of blog­gers around spe­cific topics)

Tan­gled Bank (sci­ence in general)

Encephalon (neu­ro­science)

Credit: Photo of Neu­rons by sym­pha­nee via flickr

Fol­low­ing our July and August edi­tions, here you have our Monthly Digest of the Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. Today, Octo­ber 2nd, we will list the most pop­u­lar Sep­tem­ber posts. You can con­sider it your monthly Brain Exer­cise Magazine.

(Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, check our Top­ics sec­tion, and sub­scribe to our monthly newslet­ter at the top of this page).

Mar­ket News

Edu­ca­tion, Train­ing, Health events: some events I will blog about/ speak at over the next 2-weeks.

Brain Fit­ness and SharpBrains.com in the Press: includ­ing a great Wash­ing­ton Post article.

Brains Way Smarter Than Ours (and yours, prob­a­bly): roundup of rel­e­vant news, includ­ing some Awards.

News you can use

10 (Sur­pris­ing) Mem­ory Improve­ment Tips: on the rela­tion­ship between stress and memory.

Judith Beck: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Per­son: a cog­ni­tive ther­apy pio­neer tells us about the lat­est appli­ca­tion of brain train­ing: diets.

Brain Well­ness: Train Your Brain to Be Hap­pier: our essay to par­tic­i­pate in LifeTwo’s Hap­pi­ness week.

Research

11 Neu­ro­sci­en­tists Debunk a Com­mon Myth about Brain Train­ing: sum­mary of our 11 orig­i­nal inter­views with lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tists and cog­ni­tive psychologists.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity 101 and Brain Health Glos­sary: no one is born know­ing it all…check this sum­mary of con­cepts and key­words that can help nav­i­gate through the brain fit­ness field.

Work­ing Mem­ory: an image that says much: bad and good news.

Best of the Brain from Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can: review of this great book.

An online appli­ca­tion sys­tem is now open for the AAAS Sci­ence & Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy Fellowships.

Cor­po­rate Train­ing & Leadership

Car­ni­val of the cap­i­tal­ists with a brain: we hosted this busi­ness blog car­ni­val with a brain spice.

Exec­u­tive Func­tions and Google/ Microsoft Brain Teasers: exam­ples of what our exec­u­tive func­tions are.

Soft­ware Prod­uct News

Mind­Fit by Cog­niFit, and Baroness Susan Green­field: a brain fit­ness pro­gram start­ing to get trac­tion in Europe.

Penn Treaty First To Offer Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram: today’s press release on another brain train­ing soft­ware (Posit Science)‘s deal with an insur­ance provider.

Visu­al­iza­tion Soft­ware of IBM for the Future of Med­i­cine: Inter­view: “It’s like Google Earth for the body”. Hope­fully it will include the brain.

Brain Teasers

Brain Teasers with a Neu­ro­science angle: enjoy.

Sharp­Brains Announcements

Ser­vices: we will for­mally announce soon how we “help com­pa­nies, health providers, investors, and pol­i­cy­mak­ers under­stand and profit from the emerg­ing brain fit­ness field.” But now you know.

Speak­ing: if your orga­ni­za­tion needs a good speaker and brain fit­ness expert, please con­tact us.

Finally, we are start­ing to look for qual­i­fied guest blog­gers to add their per­spec­tive. If you are inter­ested, please con­tact us and let us know about what you would like to write about, and include a brief bio or links to sam­ples. Thank you.

We are glad to see that Mind­Fit is finally mak­ing it into the pop­u­lar press, at least in the UK. The pro­gram is mak­ing big news in the UK (BBC, Times, Daily Telegragh, Guardian…) because Baroness Susan Green­field, direc­tor of the Royal Insti­tu­tion and a well-respected neu­ro­sci­en­tist, is endors­ing it. We eval­u­ated it last year and liked what we saw, based on our 10-Question Check­list. Now, remem­ber that no pro­gram is “best”, but that dif­fer­ent pro­grams can be more appro­pri­ate for spe­cific peo­ple and spe­cific goals, so read the check­list first and take a lot at other pro­grams too if you are in the mar­ket for “brain training”.

Mind­Fit is a software-based assess­ment and train­ing pro­gram for 14 cog­ni­tive skills impor­tant for healthy aging. We typ­i­cally rec­om­mend it for peo­ple over 50 (up to any age, you sim­ply need to know how to use a com­puter and a mouse) who want a novel and var­ied men­tal workout.

The pro­gram has Read the rest of this entry »

Over the months we have received many requests for good arti­cles that could be reused in a vari­ety of places, from a hos­pi­tal newslet­ter to a cor­po­rate well­ness e-newsletter and a num­ber of web­sites. We want to reach as many peo­ple as possible, so tomor­row we are launch­ing a free Con­tent “Brain Feed”, and also cus­tom con­tent services.

In short, we are going to offer a weekly arti­cle in the new SharpBrains free con­tent feed. This feed is designed to help web­site and newslet­ter pub­lish­ers dis­sem­i­nate good infor­ma­tion on brain exer­cise and fit­ness. 20 arti­cles are avail­able imme­di­ately (check them in our Arti­cles sec­tion), build­ing on the con­tent we have writ­ten in this blog.

And, if an orga­ni­za­tion wants good con­tent on brain health/ training/ fit­ness to dis­trib­ute inter­nally or exter­nally, we can help.

On a related note, we just joined the Blog­Burst net­work to offer our blog con­tent to a vari­ety of news­pa­pers. Let’s see how these ini­tia­tives work!

Alice Snell kindly brings to our atten­tion her nice post, Baby Boomers: The Beat Goes On, com­ment­ing on sev­eral reports and arti­cles on the aging work­force challenge. 

This is a very impor­tant topic, and directly related to what we are doing. Let me pro­vide an overview with these 10 points. First, some context:

1) The Con­fer­ence Board pub­lished a good report in 2005 titled America’s Aging Work­force Pos­ing New Oppor­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges. Quotes:

Not only in the US: the largest sin­gle group within the UK work­force in 2006 was com­prised of peo­ple between 45 and 59.

2) Some con­sult­ing com­pa­nies like Accen­ture seem to be bet­ting that the solu­tion will be to improve tech­nol­ogy for knowl­edge trans­fer and train younger employ­ees as soon as pos­si­ble (inter­view notes of the con­ver­sa­tion between Accenture’s CEO Bill Green and William J. Hol­stein, edi­tor in chief of Chief Exec­u­tive magazine.)

3) And the mar­ket for Tal­ent Man­age­ment and Suc­ces­sion Plan­ning solu­tions has been grow­ing steadily, and Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at Yale Uni­ver­sity have just released a good paper show­ing the impor­tance of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise to main­tain good mem­ory (full text of research paper Sin­gle Enrich­ment Vari­ables Reduce Aged-related Mem­ory Decline in Female Mice).

Some quotes from the Sci­ence Daily release Exer­cise And Men­tal Stim­u­la­tion Both Boost Mouse Mem­ory Late In Life:

• “The results sug­gest that as we get old and maybe less able to exer­cise, cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion can help to com­pen­sate. If the trend holds, write the authors, “These data may sug­gest that enrich­ment ini­ti­ated at any age can sig­nif­i­cantly improve mem­ory func­tion. And exer­cise plus men­tal chal­lenge in mid­dle age — when many peo­ple start to notice sub­tle mem­ory changes — may offer the strongest, most wide­spread ben­e­fits for mem­ory function.”
• The authors note that exer­cise was cen­tral to mem­ory rein­force­ment in all age groups. Says lead author Karyn Frick, PhD, “It is impor­tant for peo­ple of all ages to do 20 to 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic exer­cise sev­eral times a week. Keep­ing a healthy and active brain may pre­vent mem­ory decline in old age, but only a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study that fol­lows mice over time could con­firm this possibility.”

We dis­cussed this topic in more depth in my inter­view on Build­ing Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve with Dr. Yaakov Stern and in the dia­logue with Dr. Michael Merzenich that included fea­tur­ing the pio­neer­ing work of Dr. Mar­ian Dia­mond.

In short, if you want to pro­tect and improve your mem­ory, get ready to exer­cise both body and brain!