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An impaired sense of smell can sig­nal cog­ni­tive decline, but ‘smell train­ing’ could help (The Con­ver­sa­tion):

“As we age, we often have prob­lems with our abil­i­ty to smell (called olfac­to­ry dys­func­tion). Old­er peo­ple might not be able to iden­ti­fy an odour or dif­fer­en­ti­ate one odour from anoth­er. In some cas­es they might not be able to detect an odour at all.

Odour iden­ti­fi­ca­tion dif­fi­cul­ties are com­mon in peo­ple with neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­eases, includ­ing Alzheimer’s dis­ease Read the rest of this entry »

– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 8,215,961

Today we are fea­tur­ing a 2012 patent by Posit Sci­ence Cor­po­ra­tion, the devel­op­er of Brain­HQ cog­ni­tive train­ing sys­tem.

U.S. Patent No. 8,215,961: Cog­ni­tive train­ing using visu­al sweeps

• Assignee(s): Posit Sci­ence Cor­po­ra­tion
• Inventor(s): Michael M. Merzenich, Peter B. Delahunt, Joseph L. Hardy, Stephen G. Lis­berg­er, Hen­ry W. Mah­ncke
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Neu­rocog­ni­tive train­ing
• Issue Date: July 10, 2012

SharpBrains’ Take:

The back­ground of the ‘961 patent describes the decline in cog­ni­tive func­tion asso­ci­at­ed with aging, such as the reduced abil­i­ty to com­pre­hend and respond to stim­u­lus. Read the rest of this entry »

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The use of ADHD meds with­out a pre­scrip­tion, i.e., non­med­ical use, is a large and per­haps grow­ing prob­lem on col­lege cam­pus­es nation­wide. Although the per­cent of stu­dents who engage in non­med­ical use of ADHD meds varies wide­ly across dif­fer­ent schools, rates exceed­ing 30% have been report­ed at some cam­pus­es. Read the rest of this entry »

We human beings are social ani­mals. It seems intu­itive (even for intro­verts!) that social con­tact has ben­e­fits. Obvi­ous­ly we need oth­er peo­ple to ful­fill basic needs such mak­ing sure that our genes out­live. Maybe less obvi­ous­ly we seem to need oth­er peo­ple to main­tain ade­quate lev­els of men­tal well being and moti­va­tion.

Even less obvi­ous­ly, social con­tact may help us improve our brain func­tions…

Men­tal fit­ness seems to depend on a large part on being con­nect­ed with oth­er peo­ple. For instance peo­ple with low social sup­port seem to be more prone to men­tal ill­ness (McGuire & Raleigh, 1986). In 2007, Glad­stone and col­leagues stud­ied 218 patients with major depres­sion and found out that low social sup­port, espe­cial­ly com­ing from the fam­i­ly, was asso­ci­at­ed with chron­ic depres­sion.

Mere­ly imag­in­ing lone­li­ness can neg­a­tive­ly affect our behav­ior…

Read the rest of this entry »