___

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, whether it’s low­er­ing stress lev­els or help­ing to treat anx­i­ety and depres­sion. A new report released by Par­tic­i­paction on Tues­day draws atten­tion to this link, Read the rest of this entry »

Cred­it: Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham

___

This Brain Scan­ner Is Way Small­er Than fMRI but Some­how 1,000% Creepi­er (Giz­mo­do):

“It may look like some­thing befit­ting Halloween’s Michael Myers, but the device pic­tured above is actu­al­ly a break­through in neuroscience—a portable, wear­able brain scan­ner that can mon­i­tor neur­al activ­i­ty while a per­son is mov­ing Read the rest of this entry »

___

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. Read the rest of this entry »

___

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 have been chal­lenged — for exam­ple, the repro­ducibil­i­ty of elec­tri­cal-based stim­u­la­tion results is increas­ing­ly ques­tioned. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers use brain imag­ing and machine learn­ing to pre­dict which high-risk infants will devel­op autism. Cred­it: Car­oli­na Insti­tute for Devel­op­men­tal Dis­abil­i­ties.

—

A Sin­gle Brain Scan Has Been Used to Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict Autism at Just 6 Months Old (Sci­ence alert)

“Researchers have used brain scans and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to spot dif­fer­ences in how key areas of infant brains syn­chro­nise, allow­ing them to accu­rate­ly pre­dict which babies would devel­op autism spec­trum dis­or­der (ASD) as a toddler…The research, led by sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at  Chapel Hill and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, comes hot on the heels of an ear­li­er study that used two scans tak­en at 6 and 12 months to make a sim­i­lar pre­dic­tion.

Not only has this new method reduced the num­ber of scans required to make the Read the rest of this entry »