The pow­er­ful Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Accred­i­ta­tion of Teacher Edu­ca­tion (NCATE) has now issued a report that encour­ages pre-ser­vice and grad­u­ate teacher edu­ca­tion pro­grams to incor­po­rate cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science dis­cov­er­ies about child and ado­les­cent devel­op­ment into their cur­ric­u­la.  This link to a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle on this devel­op­ment will also get you to the NCATE report.

As you may have noticed, we just changed a few things in our site, includ­ing prepar­ing a more sol­id Resources sec­tion. Please take a look at the nav­i­ga­tion bar at the top.

One of the new pages, that we will update often, is an expand­ed Books page. Here are the books that we are rec­om­mend­ing now.

Fas­ci­nat­ing books on neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty (the abil­i­ty of the brain to rewire itself through expe­ri­ence):

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Sci­ence Reveals Our Extra­or­di­nary Poten­tial to Trans­form Our­selves — by Sharon Beg­ley.

 

The Brain That Changes Itself: Sto­ries of Per­son­al Tri­umph from the Fron­tiers of Brain Sci­ence — by Nor­man Doidge.

 

Great pop­u­lar sci­ence books by Read the rest of this entry »

Fun arti­cle in the Wash­ing­ton Post: Aging Japan­ese Keep Their Minds Mov­ing

• “part of a broad range of men­tal acu­ity prod­ucts that are all the rage in Japan: books, toys, food and oth­er things, sold with the pledge that they can reen­er­gize aging brains.”
• “Ana­lysts said the cur­rent brain-train­ing trend began in 2004 and 2005 when video games such as Sega Toys Co.‘s Brain Train­er and Nin­ten­do Co.‘s Brain Age became smash hits. Since its launch, Brain Age for Nintendo’s DS con­sole has sold 6.7 mil­lion copies around the world, includ­ing 3.4 mil­lion in Japan.”

We were for­tu­nate to inter­view a Japan­ese expert on this trend a few months ago. In Brain Train­ing and “Brain-ism” in Japan, we can learn a lot, such as

• “To see the activ­i­ties inside the brain was fresh for peo­ple, but the method­ol­o­gy and log­ic was not reviewed by any sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tion. It was pub­lished by Read the rest of this entry »