ETech09: on Life Hacking and Brain Training

Here you have the pre­sen­ta­tion I deliv­ered on Tues­day at ETech 2009 (this year’s O’Reil­ly Emerg­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Con­fer­ence): Emerg­ing Research and Tech­nol­o­gy for Life Hacking/ Brain Train­ing  (click to open pre­sen­ta­tion in new win­dow) Descrip­tion: Life hack­ing. Brain train­ing. They are one and the same. The brain’s frontal lobes enable our goal-ori­en­t­ed behav­ior, sup­port­ing executive…

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Videogames for Cognitive Training?

There were a few inter­est­ing research papers pre­sent­ed at the last  Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion con­ven­tions around the theme: Play­ing Video Games Offers Learn­ing Across Life Span, Say Stud­ies — Skills Trans­fer to Class­room, Sur­gi­cal Pro­ce­dures, Sci­en­tif­ic Think­ing (press release). Prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing study was that of 303 laparo­scop­ic sur­geons, which “showed that sur­geons who played…

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Brain Health: Physical or Mental Exercise?

Our fel­low blog­ger Jere­my over at Psy­Blog has writ­ten a thought­ful post com­par­ing the val­ue of a num­ber of cog­ni­tive enhanc­ing tools. His over­all ver­dict? “The evi­dence for exer­cise boost­ing cog­ni­tive func­tion is head-and-shoul­ders above that for brain train­ing, drugs, nutri­tion­al sup­ple­ments and med­i­ta­tion. Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, on the cur­rent evi­dence, exer­cise is the best way to…

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Neurotechnology, Health and Brain Fitness News

Today we have a num­ber of indus­try announce­ments: 1) New edi­tions of these Blog Car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of blog posts around spe­cif­ic top­ics) Encephalon (neu­ro­science) Grand Rounds (med­i­cine) Edu­ca­tion (guess!) Hap­pi­ness 2) The Neu­rotech­nol­o­gy Indus­try Orga­ni­za­tion has launched a Neu­rotech Job Board ded­i­cat­ed to com­mer­cial neu­ro­science (most­ly focused on clin­i­cal appli­ca­tions, like drugs and devices, not…

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