Six favorite books of 2023 to help harness the stress response and boost curiosity, wonder, and brain health at work,

It’s hard to address impor­tant issues in our lives or in soci­ety if we are stressed, deplet­ed, and iso­lat­ed. Per­haps that’s why many of 2023’s favorite books offer approach­es for real self-care. They focus on how to man­age stress, find more hap­pi­ness in life, seek won­der and inspi­ra­tion, appre­ci­ate art, under­stand our per­son­al strengths, or…

Read More

Questions grow about the validity and usefulness of direct-to-consumer blood tests for Alzheimer’s Disease

For the first time, peo­ple wor­ried about their risk of Alzheimer’s dis­ease can go online, order a blood test, and receive results in the pri­va­cy of their homes. This might seem appeal­ing on the sur­face, but the devel­op­ment has Alzheimer’s researchers and clin­i­cians up in arms. The Quest Diag­nos­tics blood test, AD-Detect, mea­sures ele­vat­ed lev­els of amyloid-beta…

Read More

Without Brain Health, you do not have Health

As you go through life, your brain under­goes extra­or­di­nary devel­op­ment. Your brain is the most adapt­able, mod­i­fi­able organ in your body, and it can change both pos­i­tive­ly and neg­a­tive­ly by how you use it each day. Just by read­ing a book such as this one, your brain has been changed. How has your brain been…

Read More

Ballroom dancing can reduce aging-related brain atrophy in the hippocampus (and, more than treadmill walking!)

Social ball­room danc­ing can improve cog­ni­tive func­tions and reduce brain atro­phy in old­er adults who are at increased risk for Alzheimer’s dis­ease and oth­er forms of demen­tia. That’s the key find­ing of my team’s recent­ly pub­lished study in the Jour­nal of Aging and Phys­i­cal Activ­i­ty. In our study, we enrolled 25 adults over 65 years…

Read More

Technology as a bridge in time: Shaping the future of brain health via today’s innovations–including those that “fail”

Remem­ber Google Glass? Google invest­ed mil­lions of dol­lars and came to mar­ket in 2014 with the first gen­er­a­tion of wear­able aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) tech­nol­o­gy. You could wear their cool head­sets with or with­out glass­es and use them to read and send email all while going about oth­er tasks. Even before it was avail­able to the public,…

Read More