Update: Promote brain plasticity by taking your daily exercise pill — physical and cognitive

Wel­come to a new edi­tion of Sharp­Brains’ e‑newsletter, fea­tur­ing nine sci­en­tif­ic reports and indus­try devel­op­ments to help pro­mote life­long brain health. #1. A must-read, and must-prac­tice: Pro­mote brain plas­tic­i­ty and keep your mind at ease by tak­ing your dai­ly “exer­cise pill” #2. If cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion came in a pill it’d be worth a quadrillion, give or…

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Study: High Cognitive Reserve (CR) seen to significantly lower dementia risk even in the presence of high Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) neuropathology

Lifes­pan Cog­ni­tive Reserve—A Secret to Cop­ing With Neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive Pathol­o­gy (JAMA Neu­rol­o­gy edi­to­r­i­al): Giv­en the lim­it­ed suc­cess of ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tions for Alzheimer dis­ease, there is increased inter­est in under­stand­ing whether mod­i­fi­able fac­tors can help cope with or post­pone the appear­ance of brain pathol­o­gy. It is esti­mat­ed that about 35% of Alzheimer risk is mod­i­fi­able. Epi­demi­o­log­ic studies…

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Quick brain teaser to prove the limits of multitasking

How often do you dis­cuss office gos­sip via chat while par­tic­i­pat­ing in a Zoom meet­ing? Or read a great arti­cle while talk­ing on the phone with a client? Or, wait, think about work prob­lems while help­ing your child with home­work? Yup, it is not easy to stay focused and be tru­ly productive. 

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Brain Teaser: Ready to stimulate those neurons in your temporal lobes?

Lan­guage is pri­mar­i­ly processed in the tem­po­ral lobes–on the sides of your brain, next to you tem­ples, most­ly on the left side–and dif­fer­ent areas in the tem­po­ral lobes deal with dif­fer­ent aspects of lan­guage. For exam­ple, the Wer­nicke area sup­ports your abil­i­ty to under­stand words, where­as the Bro­ca area allows you to pro­duce lan­guage or…

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5 quick brain teasers to sharpen two key cognitive skills: attention and working memory

Look­ing for some fun–and free–cognitive stim­u­la­tion over the week­end? Here you have a few quick brain teasers to chal­lenge your atten­tion and your work­ing mem­ory (work­ing mem­ory is the capac­i­ty to keep infor­ma­tion in your mind while work­ing on pro­cess­ing and inte­grat­ing it) Please give them a try…they are not as easy as they may seem :-)

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