Being Bilingual Enhances Executive Functions and Brain

By Alvaro Fernandez | July 8, 2010 |

Bilin­gual­ism Asso­ci­at­ed With Brain Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Involv­ing Bet­ter Effi­cien­cy in Exec­u­tive Func­tions, Research Finds (Sci­ence News) “Find­ings are very impor­tant because they show an unknown aspect of bilin­gual­ism, which goes beyond lin­guis­tic advan­tages, and they also show bilin­guals are more effec­tive in respond­ing to cer­tain stim­uli,” explains researcher Cesar Avi­la, who ensures the research shows that bilingualism…

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Nintendo Brain Age/ Training vs. Crossword Puzzles

By Alvaro Fernandez | January 27, 2009 |

Nin­ten­do brain-train­er ‘no bet­ter than pen­cil and paper’ (The Times): “The sur­vey of ten-year-old chil­dren found no evi­dence to sup­port claims in Nin­ten­do’s adver­tis­ing cam­paign, fea­tur­ing Nicole Kid­man, that users can test and reju­ve­nate their grey cells. The Nin­ten­do DS is a tech­no­log­i­cal jew­el. As a game it’s fine, said Alain Lieury, pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive psychology…

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Newsletter: Navigating Games for Health and Education

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 30, 2008

Here you have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page. Quick, Are videogames good or bad? That’s an impos­si­ble ques­tion. Good or bad for what? What  spe­cif­ic games are we talk­ing about?…

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Brain Fitness Programs For Seniors Housing, Healthcare and Insurance Providers: Evaluation Checklist

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 24, 2008 |

Dur­ing the research phase before the pub­li­ca­tion of the spe­cial report Brain Fit­ness Cen­ters in Seniors Hous­ing — A Field in the Mak­ing, pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Seniors Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (ASHA), we real­ized that there were equal amounts of inter­est and con­fu­sion among exec­u­tives and pro­fes­sion­als think­ing about adding com­put­er-based cog­ni­tive exer­cise prod­ucts to their…

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Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how

By Alvaro Fernandez | May 13, 2008 |

Today I had a great con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Buschkuehl, one of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Cog­ni­tive Neu­roimag­ing Lab researchers  involved in the cog­ni­tive train­ing study that has received much media atten­tion (New York Times, Wired, Sci­ence News…) since late April, when the study was pub­lished at the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. Reference:…

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Nintendo Brain Training and Schools

By Alvaro Fernandez | March 25, 2008 |

An inter­est­ing recent arti­cle announce­sPupils to start day with Nin­ten­do Brain Train­ing(UK’s Dai­ly Tele­graph). Some quotes:  — “Chil­dren at 16 pri­ma­ry schools are to start each day by play­ing on a Nin­ten­do games con­sole, it was dis­closed yes­ter­day.” — “The pupils will play “brain train­ing” exer­cis­es before lessons after a pilot scheme at a school…

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