Virtual “Brain Games” roundtable: Why we can, and SHOULD, train our brains

In prepa­ra­tion for the new sea­son of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Brain Games, start­ing this Sun­day Feb­ru­ary 14th, their pro­duc­ers asked us to par­tic­i­pate in a vir­tu­al round­table around this thought-pro­­vok­ing ques­tion: Do you think indi­vid­u­als can train their brain to respond in a par­tic­u­lar way to cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, or do you think our brain’s innate “star­tle response”…

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Brain Study Links Emotional Self-Regulation and Math Performance

Brain Study Points to Poten­tial Treat­ments for Math Anx­i­ety (Edu­ca­tion Week): “The study, pub­lished this morn­ing in the jour­nal Cere­bral Cor­tex, is a con­tin­u­a­tion of work on high­ly math-anx­ious peo­ple being con­duct­ed by Sian L. Beilock, asso­ciate psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, and doc­tor­al can­di­date Ian M. Lyons. In pri­or research, Beilock has found…

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Who Says This is The Classroom of the Future?

The New York Times has recent­ly pub­lished sev­er­al very good and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed articles…let’s try and con­nect some dots. What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­o­gy in lit­er­al­ly mind­less ways? What if the Edu­ca­tion of the Future (some­times also…

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Debunking 10 Brain Training/ Cognitive Health Myths

Think about this: How can any­one take care of his or her brain when every week brings a new bar­rage of arti­cles and stud­ies which seem to con­tra­dict each oth­er? Do sup­ple­ments improve mem­o­ry? Do you need both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise or is one of them enough? Which brain train­ing approach, if any, is worth…

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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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