Study in China finds that retirement may accelerate cognitive decline, even for those with stable income

Peo­ple who retire ear­ly suf­fer from accel­er­at­ed cog­ni­tive decline and may even encounter ear­ly onset of demen­tia, accord­ing to a new eco­nom­ic study (Note: opens PDF) I con­duct­ed with my doc­tor­al stu­dent Alan Adel­man. To estab­lish that find­ing, we exam­ined the effects of a rur­al pen­sion pro­gram Chi­na intro­duced in 2009 that pro­vid­ed peo­ple who…

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DARPA-funded nonsurgical neurotechnologies push the frontier of brain-machine interfaces

Rice Uni­ver­si­ty Charges Into the Future with Mag­net­ics and Bioim­plants (All About Cir­cuits): Advances in self-gen­er­at­ing drug deliv­ery sys­tems, brain-to-brain com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and injury mit­i­ga­tion tech­nolo­gies are just some of the newest research com­ing down the pipeline from Rice Uni­ver­si­ty. Sev­er­al research projects fund­ed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agen­cy’s (DARPA) N3 pro­gram might herald…

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Five brain teasers to celebrate Brain Awareness Week 2021

Brain Aware­ness Week 2021 just start­ed. Let’s cel­e­brate by chal­leng­ing our minds with a few fun brain teasers and illu­sions :-) Here’s a selec­tion of five stim­u­lat­ing brain teasers that read­ers enjoyed the most so far in 2021: Where’s the baby? And a cou­ple oth­er sur­pris­ing illu­sions Please com­plete these proverbs to exer­cise your brain in familiar…

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Given cognitive strengths and needs are diverse, what brain training may work best for each person and under which conditions?

Does ‘Brain Train­ing’ Actu­al­ly Work? (Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): If there were an app on your phone that could improve your mem­o­ry, would you try it? Who wouldn’t want a bet­ter mem­o­ry? After all, our rec­ol­lec­tions are frag­ile and can be impaired by dis­eases, injuries, men­tal health con­di­tions and, most acute­ly for all of us, aging.

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Brain scans show lower accumulation of tau and amyloid pathology among cognitive “super-agers”

Super-Agers Show Resis­tance to Tau and Amy­loid Accu­mu­la­tion, Main­tain High Cog­ni­tive Func­tion (Soci­ety of Nuclear Med­i­cine and Mol­e­c­u­lar Imag­ing press release): Super-agers, or indi­vid­u­als whose cog­ni­tive skills are above the norm even at an advanced age, have been found to have increased resis­tance to tau and amy­loid pro­teins, accord­ing to research pre­sent­ed at the Society…

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