emotional bottleneck

Good brainy stories at The New Yorker, The Economist, CNNMoney

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worker-brainsSev­er­al excel­lent arti­cles at The New York­er, The Econ­o­mist and CNN­Money dis­cuss new health and indus­try oppor­tu­ni­ties around brain fit­ness, applied neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and dig­i­tal health, quot­ing Sharp­Brains’ CEO, pro­fes­sion­al mar­ket report and gen­er­al-inter­est book. Enjoy!

5 ways to pro­tect your brain, and boost your career (CNN­Money):

“Fer­nan­dez is co-author of a book called The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness that boils down the cur­rent explo­sion of new research in this area to spe­cif­ic advice on what to do now to guard against Alzheimer’s and oth­er forms of cog­ni­tive impair­ment lat­er on…By a lucky coin­ci­dence, there’s plen­ty of over­lap between what’s good for your brain and what could tur­bo-charge your career. Con­sid­er these five tips…”

Cog­ni­tive train­ing may be a mon­eyspin­ner despite sci­en­tists’ doubts (The Economist):

“(Most con­sumers) are not look­ing for a guar­an­teed way to avoid Alzheimer’s dis­ease; they just want to enhance or main­tain the per­for­mance of their brain “bet­ter than by doing the oth­er kind of things they already do and that have far less evi­dence to sup­port [them], such as cross­word puz­zles, tak­ing vit­a­min sup­ple­ments, watch­ing edu­ca­tion­al TV shows, or sim­ply doing noth­ing,” he says.”

Men­tally fit — Work­outs at the brain gym (The New Yorker):

“To every­one who has solved today’s cross­word puz­zle: Sor­ry, but that is no guar­an­tee that you will end up less nut­ty than the rest of us. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, the C.E.O. of Sharp­Brains, a mar­ket research firm con­cerned with brain health, told me, “Once some­one has done hun­dreds or thou­sands of them, the mar­gin­al ben­e­fit tends toward zero, because it becomes just anoth­er rou­tine, easy activity—probably a bit more stim­u­lat­ing and effort­ful than watch­ing TV, but not enough to bring ben­e­fits oth­er than becom­ing a mas­ter at cross­word puzzles…Fernandez, of Sharp­Brains, told me, “If you find a game that address­es a rel­e­vant cog­ni­tive or emo­tion­al bot­tle­neck, you can make a dif­fer­ence in your qual­i­ty of life in ten to fif­teen hours of training.”