Brain-Based-Education

Brain Awareness Week is here!

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We have planned a num­ber of fun posts, start­ing tomor­row, to cel­e­brate Brain Aware­ness Week (March 10–16th). WeBrain Awareness Week hope you will enjoy them.

Let me share a taste of a few arti­cles you will find here dur­ing the week:

- Dr. Adri­an Pre­da, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at UC Irvine School of Med­i­cine, will help us exer­cise our brains by chal­leng­ing us to exer­cise more…our bodies.

- We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 on Tues­day March 11th, shar­ing its 10 High­lights. This is a project where we have spent many many ener­gies over the last 9 months…so we are hap­py to final­ly be able to deliv­er it!

- An arti­cle by UCS­F’s Gre­go­ry Kel­let (who wrote this great arti­cle on why man­ag­ing stress is impor­tant for our brains) help­ing us iden­ti­fy ways to pre­cise­ly do that.

- An in-depth inter­view with Eric Jensen, brain-based edu­ca­tion expert and author of this great recent arti­cle.

- Edu­won­kette, a superb (and anony­mous) edu­ca­tion blog­ger, will expand the con­ver­sa­tion by ask­ing, “Do we, as a soci­ety, have a clear goal of what the K12 sys­tem is sup­posed to accomplish?”

- Dr. Lar­ry McCleary, one of our esteemed con­trib­u­tors, will speak at the Aspen Cen­ter for Inte­gral Health to present his lat­est book, and will blog about the event.

So, please book­mark our URL, or sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (above) or join our blog RSS feed.

And, of course, vis­it the Brain Aware­ness Week’s Inter­na­tion­al Cal­en­dar of events to find if there are some stim­u­lat­ing events near you. If you live in Wash­ing­ton DC, take a look at the “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties orga­nized by the Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Center.

Brain News: Software, Education, Arts

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A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to trav­el. I par­tic­i­pat­ed yes­ter­day in a fun pan­el dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to vis­it our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent relat­ed resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Cognitive Neuroscience @ MIT OpenCourseWare

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The great MIT Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive offers a lot of free mate­ri­als on Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences. You can browse lec­ture notes, read­ings, and more on a vari­ety of psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science courses.

  • “The human brain is the most com­plex, sophis­ti­cat­ed, and pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing device known. To study its com­plex­i­ties, the Depart­ment of Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy com­bines the exper­i­men­tal tech­nolo­gies of neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, neu­ro­science, and psy­chol­o­gy, with the the­o­ret­i­cal pow­er that comes from the fields of com­pu­ta­tion­al neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive science.”
  • “The Depart­ment was found­ed by Hans-Lukas Teu­ber in 1964 as a Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, with the then-rad­i­cal vision that the study of brain and mind are insep­a­ra­ble. Today, at a time of increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion, our goal remains to under­stand cog­ni­tion- its process­es, and its mech­a­nisms at the lev­el of mol­e­cules, neu­rons, net­works of neu­rons, and cog­ni­tive mod­ules. We are unique among neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive sci­ence depart­ments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambi­tion. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis includ­ing mol­e­c­u­lar, cel­lu­lar, sys­tems, com­pu­ta­tion­al and cog­ni­tive approaches.”

There is a fas­ci­nat­ing new course titled A Clin­i­cal Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, includ­ing Top­ics and Lec­ture Sum­maries such as

  • “Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: Teach­ing Old Dogs New Tricks. A sur­pris­ing dis­cov­ery in the last few years in neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy has been that neu­rons are born, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, in the adult mam­malian brain. Ini­tial­ly, this had been shown in ani­mals and, more recent­ly, in the humans hip­pocam­pus, the site of declar­a­tive mem­o­ry for­ma­tion. (See Gree­nough). Fur­ther­more, the rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis in ani­mals has been enhanced by expe­ri­ence, both phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and liv­ing in enriched envi­ron­ments (See [Read more…] about Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science @ MIT OpenCourseWare