Imagine you have moved to a new city and bought a condo advertised as “metaverse enabled.” Upon closing, along with the physical keys to your condo, you receive a unique cryptographic key to the community. You move into your neighborhood both physically and digitally. With the crypto key, you link your own personal metaverse profile to the condo. This merges your personal metaverse, including a digital catalog of all the objects in your home, to a digital map of the new space integrating all the sensors and devices that control the objects through the metaverse. [Read more…] about Beyond bulky VR headsets: Voice recognition, eye tracking, and natural gestures in the era of the metaverse and the “Medi-verse”
Ten resources, brain teasers and illusions to celebrate Brain Awareness Week 2023
We invite you to celebrate Brain Awareness Week (March 13–19th, 2023) by learning more about that key yet often-overlooked organ and by putting it to good use via some fun brain teasers and illusions 🙂
Can you connect these pairs of words?
- Try these quick teasers to challenge your working memory
- Three classic optical illusions, explained
- Test your cognitive skills with these proverbs
- Math teaser: Will you finish your thesis on time?
- What do you see? And, can you unsee it?
- Study examines common cognitive biases such as this one and ways to mitigate them
About Brain Awareness Week:
Every March, Brain Awareness Week (BAW) unites the efforts of partner organizations worldwide in a celebration of the brain for people of all ages. Activities are limited only by the organizers’ imaginations and include open days at neuroscience labs; exhibitions about the brain; lectures on brain-related topics; social media campaigns; displays at libraries and community centers; classroom workshops; and more. This year BAW takes place March 13–19th, 2023.
The 7 Habits of Highly Stress-Resilient Minds
Are you suffering from chronic stress? Many of us are—whether we’re stressed out by our jobs, complicated relationships, caregiving responsibilities, or the general state of the world.
That’s where Elissa Epel’s new book, The Stress Prescription, comes in. A health psychologist and director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center at the University of California, San Francisco, Epel explains how stress affects our bodies and minds—including our health, happiness, and longevity—and how to manage it in the best way possible.
Too many of us are in a constant state of alertness, she argues, which makes us ill-prepared to navigate the everyday stressors and bigger upsets that occur when living a full life. We may think we’re relaxed, but we’re actually maintaining a low-level vigilance that’s hard on our bodies. Constant physiological strain can shorten our telomeres (the caps at the ends of our DNA that protect it from aging)—a process she wrote about in her bestselling book, The Telomere Effect.
Epel emphasizes that not all stress is inherently bad—and that we shouldn’t aim for a stress-free life. We need our physiological stress response to survive, as it can come in handy when we’re gearing up to perform or facing an actual life-or-death threat. [Read more…] about The 7 Habits of Highly Stress-Resilient Minds
CMS: anti-amyloid drug Leqembi (lecanemab) doesn’t meet the “reasonable and necessary” standard required for wider Medicare coverage
CMS Sticks to Sharply Limited Coverage of New Alzheimer’s Drug, Leqembi (Managed Healthcare Executive):
For now, CMS (Note: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) is sticking to the coverage decision it made for Aduhelm (aducanumab) and applying it Leqembi (lecanemab). The decision limits Medicare coverage of the two Alzheimer disease’s drugs to Medicare beneficiaries who have enrolled in clinical trials of the drugs
The decision, which was announced in a press release yesterday, was denounced in strong language by the Alzheimer’s Association. [Read more…] about CMS: anti-amyloid drug Leqembi (lecanemab) doesn’t meet the “reasonable and necessary” standard required for wider Medicare coverage
BrainHealth Week starts today! Plus: dancing, personalized mental health, brain stimulation and more
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains e‑newsletter, annoucing the kick-off of BrainHealth Week and featuring some stimulating resources and teasers.
#1. BrainHealth Week (February 20–24th) starts today:
Explore many fun events including a daily text challenge, a talk with the always great Dr. Tom Insel, and more!
#2. Without Brain Health, you do not have Health
Important article given that “It typically takes twenty to forty years or more for scientific discoveries to meaningfully benefit human life. We cannot wait that long.” — Wise words!
#3. Sin Salud Cerebral, Usted no tiene Salud –same article, in Spanish, for extra mental stimulation and for sharing 🙂
“En los últimos diez años, los neurocientificos hemos descubierto mucho acerca de cómo funciona el cerebro, cómo mejorar la salud y el funcionamiento del cerebro y la mente a lo largo de la vida, y cómo esto contribuye a nuestra salud y bienestar en general. Únase a nosotros y asegúrese de que los mejores años de su cerebro están aún por venir, recordando que: Sin salud cerebral, usted no tiene salud.”
“(Dancing) generated significantly greater improvements than treadmill walking on one measure of executive function and on processing speed, which is the time it takes to respond to or process information. Compared with walking, dancing was also associated with reduced brain atrophy in the hippocampus – a brain region that is key to memory functioning and is particularly affected by Alzheimer’s disease … We think that social dancing may be more beneficial than walking because it is physically, socially and cognitively demanding – and therefore strengthens a wide network of brain regions.”
“To do so, Alto is pairing a trove of data on EEG activity, genetics, behavioral task measurements and other factors to see which of its drugs fits best with patients who have depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. The company’s artificial intelligence platform homes in on three buckets: cognition, emotion and sleep.”
“GN Group will integrate Sonde’s Mental Fitness vocal biomarker into its hearing products. The company is already working with Sonde to develop an MCI vocal biomarker. Qualcomm, which has already integrated Sonde’s vocal biomarkers into its mobile device chipsets, has extended the relationship to include its wearable chipsets.”
“To put this into perspective, the likelihood of a seizure from rTMS (0.003%) is lower than that associated with the use of antidepressants and antipsychotics (0.1–1, 5%) … Moreover, when such seizures occur they do so mostly outside the clinician’s office, by contrast with rTMS (Perera et al., 2016). For low intensity tDCS, tACS, tRNS seizure risk is completely absent … As an organisation and representatives of NIBS clinicians and professionals from across Europe, we, the ESBS, therefore disagree with this EU decision and in particular with the factually incorrect justifications of that decision to reclassify TM
S and TES as invasive technologies”
Finally, a couple of brain teasers to help you test your mental rotation cognitive skills:
#9. Brain teaser to stimulate your mental imagery, spatial rotation … and appetite
Have a great BrainHealth Week!
Sin salud cerebral, usted no tiene salud
A lo largo de la vida, su cerebro va a experimentar un desarrollo extraordinario. Su cerebro es el órgano más adaptable y modificable de su cuerpo, y puede cambiar tanto positiva como negativamente, dependiendo de cómo lo utilice cada día. Simplemente leyendo este libro, su cerebro ha cambiado.
¿Cuánto y cómo va cambiar en los próximos años y décadas? La buena noticia es que muchos de los deterioros relacionados con la edad se pueden prevenir, e incluso revertir. El hecho de que usted éste leyendo este libro me dice que está motivado para entender y mejorar el funcionamiento de su cerebro, lo cual es el mejor punto de partida. [Read more…] about Sin salud cerebral, usted no tiene salud