Andrew-Sullivan

The Gene Delusion: IQ and the environment

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An anony­mous read­er of Andrew Sul­li­van’s blog writes a superb com­ment, repro­duced here:

“One thing Wat­son and oth­ers for­get is that the brain is high­ly mal­leable based on envi­ron­ment. Although he is the father of DNA he knows very lit­tle about neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis. Pre­vi­ous­ly it was thought that the human brain was ‘hard­wired’ after a cer­tain age. This is not true. Not only is not true, but the human mind is capa­ble of adap­ta­tion but actu­al neu­ron growth even late in life. Ten years ago this was thought impossible.

Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty proves that a nur­tur­ing social and fam­i­ly set­ting shifts IQ, per­spec­tive, and emo­tion­al IQ. The so-called bell curve isn’t genet­ic. Oppressed Tibetans and Chi­nese eth­nic minori­ties ‑whose test scores soar in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da- are 20–30 points low­er in their home­land. That 20–30 points deficit is in the same range of a lot of groups that are attacked or threat­ened (Mus­lims in France, Chris­tians in Nige­ria, Blacks in Amer­i­ca). Con­verse­ly when oppressed groups are removed from their envi­ron­ment their IQ, emo­tion­al health returns to a nor­mal rate, thus prov­ing that is NOT genetic.

It is plas­tic, shift­ing and based upon the environment.

That is why peo­ple [Read more…] about The Gene Delu­sion: IQ and the environment

Brain Health Newsletter, February Edition, and Brain Awareness Week

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We hope you are enjoy­ing the grow­ing cov­er­age of Brain Fit­ness as much as we are. Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago-you can sub­scribe to this month­ly email update in the box on the right hand side.

In this post, we will briefly cover:

I. Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chica­go Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.

II. Events: we are out­reach part­ners for the Learn­ing & the Brain con­fer­ence, which will gath­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists and edu­ca­tors, and for the Dana Foundation’s Brain Aware­ness Week.

III. Pro­gram Reviews: The Wall Street Jour­nal reviewed six dif­fer­ent pro­grams for brain exer­cise and aging, and the one we offer is one of the two win­ners. A col­lege-lev­el coun­sel­ing cen­ter starts offer­ing our stress man­age­ment one. And we inter­view a Notre Dame sci­en­tist who has con­duct­ed a repli­ca­tion study for the work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing pro­gram for kids with ADD/ ADHD.

IV. New Offer­ings: we have start­ed to offer two infor­ma­tion pack­ages that can be very use­ful for peo­ple who want to bet­ter under­stand this field before they com­mit to any par­tic­u­lar pro­gram: learn more about our Brain Fit­ness 101 guide and Exer­cise Your Brain DVD.

V. Web­site and Blog Sum­ma­ry: we revamped our home page and have had a very busy month writ­ing many good arti­cles. We also host­ed two “Blog Carnivals”- don’t you want to know what that means?
[Read more…] about Brain Health Newslet­ter, Feb­ru­ary Edi­tion, and Brain Aware­ness Week