ADHD-medication

Update: ¿Habla Español? Know someone who’d enjoy a great brain book in Spanish?

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Portada_ComoInvertirEnSuCerebroTime for Sharp­Brains’ Feb­ru­ary e‑Newsletter, this time fea­tur­ing the glob­al launch of our new book, in Span­ish, Cómo inver­tir en su cere­bro: Una guía Sharp­Brains para mejo­rar su mente y su vida, avail­able already as a soft-cov­er and e‑book!

–> If you speak Span­ish, please get a copy for your­self. Tam­bién puede ver el video de la char­la de pre­sentación aquí (comien­za en el min­u­to 5), y leer el artícu­lo Esculpir el cere­bro, mucho más allá de un sueño de Ramón y Cajal.

–> If you don’t speak Span­ish, please share this with some­one who does…we believe he or she will love the book! We’ve been work­ing quite hard over the last year to deliv­er a great adap­ta­tion of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness to “la lengua de Cer­vantes” — the jury is now out.

Some oth­er news…

Brain Health Sci­ence & Practice:

Dig­i­tal Brain Health Indus­try & technology:

BAW-2014-logo
Final­ly, please keep in mind that March 10–16th is 2014 Brain Aware­ness Week. Let’s all find a way to cel­e­brate and invest in our most pre­cious resource!

 

Update: New brain science leads to new tools and to new thinking

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We often view mem­o­ry, think­ing, emo­tions, as com­plete­ly sep­a­rate enti­ties, but they tru­ly are part of the same process. So, if we want to improve brain health, we need to pay atten­tion to the “weak link” in that process. In today’s soci­ety, man­ag­ing stress and neg­a­tive emo­tions is often that weak link, as we dis­cuss dur­ing Octo­ber Q&A ses­sion with par­tic­i­pants in Sharp­Brains’ new e‑course. Time now for Sharp­Brains’ Octo­ber 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing new sci­ence, new resources and new thinking.

New sci­ence:

New tools:

New think­ing:

That’s it for now. Have a Hap­py Halloween!

Pic cour­tesy of Big­Stock­Pho­to

Does ADHD medication treatment in childhood increase adult employment?

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Although ADHD used to be con­sid­ered a dis­or­der of child­hood, fol­low-up stud­ies indi­cate that between 30% and 60% of chil­dren with ADHD con­tin­ue to expe­ri­ence symp­toms and impair­ment in adult­hood. And, even when ADHD symp­toms decline over time, many indi­vid­u­als con­tin­ue to expe­ri­ence sig­nif­i­cant impair­ment in impor­tant areas of functioning.

For exam­ple, chil­dren with ADHD have [Read more…] about Does ADHD med­ica­tion treat­ment in child­hood increase adult employment?

ADHD: Brain Training, Neurofeedback, Diet, and More.

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ADHD, or atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der, affects mil­lions of chil­dren and adults (up to 5% of chil­dren in the US).  More and more evi­dence sug­gests that brain train­ing may be key to help these indi­vid­u­als. With this in mind, we put togeth­er our most recent arti­cles on the top­ic to  a) help you bet­ter under­stand what is going in the brain of a per­son with ADHD, and b) pro­vide you with up-to-date infor­ma­tion on what can be done to fight the dis­or­der and improve the lives of peo­ple suf­fer­ing from it. We par­tic­u­lar­ly thank Dr. Rabin­er from Duke Uni­ver­sity for writ­ing many of these articles.

What is ADHD?

What kind of atten­tion is involved in ADHD? ADHD may be con­sid­ered as a prob­lem in the will­ful con­trol of atten­tion as opposed to a pure deficit in the abil­i­ty to pay attention.

Self-Reg­u­la­tion and ADHD: The fun­da­men­tal deficit in indi­vid­u­als with ADHD may be one of self-con­trol: [Read more…] about ADHD: Brain Train­ing, Neu­ro­feed­back, Diet, and More.

Mindfulness Meditation for Adults & Teens with ADHD

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We have talked about the val­ue of med­i­ta­tion before (see Mind­ful­ness and Med­i­ta­tion in meditationSchools), as a form of well-direct­ed men­tal exer­cise than can help train atten­tion and emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­tion.  Which oth­er stud­ies have shown how it strength­ens spe­cif­ic parts of the brain, main­ly in the frontal lobe.

Dr. Rabin­er shares with us, below, an excel­lent review of a new study that ana­lyzes the ben­e­fits of mind­ful­ness for ado­les­cents and adults with atten­tion deficits. He writes that “although this is clear­ly a pre­lim­i­nary study, the results are both inter­est­ing and encouraging.”

- Alvaro

Does Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion Help Adults & Teens with ADHD

– By Dr. David Rabiner

Although med­ica­tion treat­ment is effec­tive for many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, includ­ing ado­les­cents adults, there remains an under­stand­able need to explore and devel­op inter­ven­tions that can com­ple­ment or even sub­sti­tute for med­ica­tion. This is true for a vari­ety of rea­sons including:
1) Not all adults with ADHD ben­e­fit from medication.
2) Among those who ben­e­fit, many have resid­ual dif­fi­cul­ties that need to be addressed via oth­er means.
3) Some adults with ADHD expe­ri­ence adverse effects that pre­vent them from remain­ing on medication.

[Read more…] about Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion for Adults & Teens with ADHD

Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men

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Thinking menEllen recent­ly wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy!

  1. We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­o­ry, so it is impor­tant to be able to man­age stress well, with med­i­ta­tion or oth­er meth­ods. Check here your lev­el of stress to see how much this point applies to you. Please remem­ber, laugh­ing is good for your brain.
  2. Don’t think too much-we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncom­fort­able state.
  3. Please remem­ber our hum­ble ori­gins. We are tool-using ani­mals, which is why we like play­ing with all kinds of toys, from a car to that blackberry.
  4. When we are stub­born, you are enti­tled to remind us that even apes can learn-if you help us see the point. Show us that change is pos­si­ble at any age. Believe it or not, we can lis­ten.
  5. Espe­cial­ly if we can find com­mon ground: what about chat­ting about sports psy­chol­o­gy?.
  6. Please moti­vate us to lis­ten and be open mind­ed to learn with wise words. If that does­n’t work, please per­se­vere with nice words. Please don’t ever say that we are worse than pink dol­phins-if we feel attacked, we’ll just disengage.
  7. Some­times we don’t coop­er­ate enough?. Please give us time for our brains to ful­ly evolve, we have been try­ing for a while!
  8. You can help us grow. For the next lead­er­ship work­shop, buy us copies of the Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. You may think we don’t need this… but at our core we real­ly want to get bet­ter at Grat­i­tude and Altru­ism. We want to be able to play with the ulti­mate toy: our genes!
  9. If that book is sold out, we could also ben­e­fit from read­ing Dama­sio’s Descartes Error and dis­cov­er how emo­tions are impor­tant for good deci­sion-mak­ing. Or help us improve our abil­i­ty to read emo­tion­al mes­sages. As long as we believe we can some­how ben­e­fit from it, we’ll try!
  10. If you lead some­one with Bill Gates-like Frontal Lobes, con­grat­u­late him for his brain. If you don’t, encour­age him to fol­low track. Please be patient…

Now, any tak­ers for Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Women or Men Who Lead Men?