Next in NASA’s path to Mars: Overcoming astronauts’ cognitive and mental health challenges

By SharpBrains | April 21, 2021

Space Between the Ears (Cere­brum): A few short months ago, news pro­grams around the globe showed NASA engi­neers and sci­en­tists cel­e­brat­ing as a robot named Per­se­ver­ance suc­cess­ful­ly land­ed on the sur­face of Mars. The mis­sion: cap­ture and share images and audio that have nev­er been seen or heard before. As impressed as most observers were…

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Higher body mass index (BMI) linked to lower blood supply to the brain in large neuroimaging study

By SharpBrains | August 7, 2020

Body weight has sur­pris­ing, alarm­ing impact on brain func­tion (Sci­ence Dai­ly): As a per­son­’s weight goes up, all regions of the brain go down in activ­i­ty and blood flow, accord­ing to a new brain imag­ing study in the Jour­nal of Alzheimer’s Dis­ease … sci­en­tists ana­lyzed over 35,000 func­tion­al neu­roimag­ing scans using sin­­gle-pho­­ton emis­sion com­put­er­ized tomog­ra­phy (SPECT) from…

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Report finds only 35% of Canadian youth get the physical activity recommended for brain health

By SharpBrains | June 22, 2018

___ Get­ting kids out­side and active could help with brain health: Par­tic­i­paction report (The Globe and Mail): “The phys­i­cal ben­e­fits of kids lead­ing an active lifestyle, includ­ing bet­ter heart health and a decreased risk of devel­op­ing Type 2 dia­betes, are well known. But a grow­ing body of research sug­gests there are sig­nif­i­cant men­tal ben­e­fits as well,…

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Reinventing Brain Medicine, Pharma adopts Digital Therapeutics: Evidence-based videogames, smartphone apps, and sensors

By SharpBrains | March 19, 2018

___ From app store to drug store, dig­i­tal health is redefin­ing pharma’s pipeline (STAT): “The pitch­es always sound­ed promis­ing: A new soft­ware app could track glu­cose lev­els for peo­ple with dia­betes or soothe the brains of insom­ni­acs. Most phar­ma exec­u­tives would polite­ly smile and nod, but then park their mon­ey some­where else. Not anymore.

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Photobiomodulation: A new and promising way to enhance brain function

By Dr. Lew Lim | December 4, 2017

___ As is increas­ing­ly evi­dent, there are mul­ti­ple meth­ods aimed at enhanc­ing brain func­tion. Brain train­ing and mind­ful­ness prac­tices are com­mon­ly used. Sub­­s­tance-based meth­ods are pop­u­lar too, includ­ing hal­lu­cino­gens in the form of plant extracts, and drugs. Same as tran­scra­nial direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion (tDCS) and tran­scra­nial mag­net­ic stim­u­la­tion (TMS): All of these are promis­ing but…

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