Brain Fitness Newsletter: mid-February Edition

Our Jan­u­ary Newslet­ter received a good deal of feed­back from many read­ers. Based on it, our new approach is to select the top 10 most impor­tant arti­cles every oth­er week. Please take a look at this first exper­i­ment, and let us know you feedback.

(Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our month­ly newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this newslet­ter by email).

News and Events

Stress Man­age­ment is Key Fac­tor For Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness: a great cov­er sto­ry in US News & World Report, and an excel­lent arti­cle in Pre­ven­tion Mag­a­zine that was high­light­ed on the Today Show this week, both fea­ture the impor­tance of man­ag­ing stress, one of the 4 pil­lars of brain health.

Brain Train­ing Games: Con­text, Trends, Ques­tions: We pre­sent­ed Sharp­Brains’ upcom­ing report, The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008, on Tues­day Feb 12th at an event spon­sored by the MIT Club of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and SmartSilvers.

Stress and Neur­al Wreck­age: Part of the Brain Plas­tic­i­ty Puz­zle: an insight­ful arti­cle by one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, Gre­go­ry Kellet‑a researcher at UCSF- who pro­vides con­text on how stress kills neurons.

Clos­ing the Cir­cuit: Helen May­berg’s research could rev­o­lu­tion­ize depres­sion treat­ment: accu­mu­lat­ed chron­ic stress can build into depres­sion over time. Thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine, Jill Sut­tie offers a fas­ci­nat­ing overview of depres­sion and a promis­ing new treatment.

Posit Sci­ence Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram 2.0: Open Ques­tions: we ask sev­er­al ques­tions to one of the lead­ing “brain fit­ness gyms”, try­ing to help con­sumers and insti­tu­tions nav­i­gate through this emerg­ing landscape.
Improv­ing Dri­ving Skills and Brain Func­tion­ing- Inter­view with ACTIVE’s Jer­ri Edwards: in-depth inter­view with Dr. Jer­ri Edwards, an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da’s School of Aging Stud­ies and Co-Inves­ti­ga­tor of the influ­en­cial ACTIVE study, on the val­ue of cog­ni­tive training. 

Edu­ca­tion & Learning

Are Schools (Cog­ni­tive­ly) Nutri­tive for Chil­dren’s Com­plex Think­ing?: edu­ca­tors Thomas O’Brien and Chris­tine Wal­lach present a very stim­u­lat­ing essay on the impor­tance of prob­lem-solv­ing, encour­ag­ing com­plex game-play­ing for chil­dren’s com­plete “cog­ni­tive nutrition”.

Musi­cal train­ing as men­tal exer­cise for cog­ni­tive per­for­mance: We often hear (glad­ly!) how teach­ers use our blog arti­cles and brain teasers in their class­es. So we are going to rec­og­nize and pub­lish a great essay by high school stu­dent Megan.

Brain Teas­er

Words in your brain: Pas­cale Mich­e­lon presents a brain exer­cise whose aim is to stim­u­late the con­nec­tions or asso­ci­a­tions between words in your tem­po­ral lobe. Learn as you exercise!

Rec­om­mend­ed Book

Spark: the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary New Sci­ence of Exer­cise and the Brain, by John Ratey: a superb overview on why and how phys­i­cal exer­cise is so impor­tant for our men­tal health.

Enjoy the weekend!