Eric-Jensen

Brain Awareness Week is here!

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We have planned a num­ber of fun posts, start­ing tomor­row, to cel­e­brate Brain Aware­ness Week (March 10–16th). WeBrain Awareness Week hope you will enjoy them.

Let me share a taste of a few arti­cles you will find here dur­ing the week:

- Dr. Adri­an Pre­da, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at UC Irvine School of Med­i­cine, will help us exer­cise our brains by chal­leng­ing us to exer­cise more…our bodies.

- We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 on Tues­day March 11th, shar­ing its 10 High­lights. This is a project where we have spent many many ener­gies over the last 9 months…so we are hap­py to final­ly be able to deliv­er it!

- An arti­cle by UCS­F’s Gre­go­ry Kel­let (who wrote this great arti­cle on why man­ag­ing stress is impor­tant for our brains) help­ing us iden­ti­fy ways to pre­cise­ly do that.

- An in-depth inter­view with Eric Jensen, brain-based edu­ca­tion expert and author of this great recent arti­cle.

- Edu­won­kette, a superb (and anony­mous) edu­ca­tion blog­ger, will expand the con­ver­sa­tion by ask­ing, “Do we, as a soci­ety, have a clear goal of what the K12 sys­tem is sup­posed to accomplish?”

- Dr. Lar­ry McCleary, one of our esteemed con­trib­u­tors, will speak at the Aspen Cen­ter for Inte­gral Health to present his lat­est book, and will blog about the event.

So, please book­mark our URL, or sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (above) or join our blog RSS feed.

And, of course, vis­it the Brain Aware­ness Week’s Inter­na­tion­al Cal­en­dar of events to find if there are some stim­u­lat­ing events near you. If you live in Wash­ing­ton DC, take a look at the “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties orga­nized by the Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Center.

Brain News: Software, Education, Arts

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A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to trav­el. I par­tic­i­pat­ed yes­ter­day in a fun pan­el dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to vis­it our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent relat­ed resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Brain Fitness Newsletter: Brain Awareness Week is March 10–16th

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Here you are have the bi-month­ly Digest of our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).Crossword Puzzles Brain fitness

First, an announce­ment: March 10–16th is Brain Aware­ness Week, an inter­na­tion­al effort orga­nized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives to advance pub­lic aware­ness about the progress and ben­e­fits of brain research. Join the hun­dreds of activ­i­ties world­wide by vis­it­ing the Inter­na­tion­al Cal­en­dar of events, or the week’s main web­site.
[Read more…] about Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter: Brain Aware­ness Week is March 10–16th

Announcing Expert Contributors to SharpBrains.com

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Start­ing this week, you will start see­ing a grow­ing num­ber of Expert Con­trib­u­tors writ­ing in our blog and web­site, so that we can col­lec­tive­ly dis­cuss the lat­est research and trends on cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al train­ing, brain fit­ness and health, and the impli­ca­tions of brain research in gen­er­al for our every­day lives. All of it, spiced up by stim­u­lat­ing brain teasers.

So, if you haven’t already, make sure to sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (above) and our RSS feed (on the right).

Let me intro­duce, In alpha­bet­i­cal order, the Expert Con­trib­u­tors who will share their knowl­edge with us in Jan­u­ary and February.

- Wes Car­roll, SB in Com­put­er Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing from MIT, and Puz­zle Mas­ter for Ask a Sci­en­tist lec­ture series.

- Simon Evans, PhD., and Paul Burghardt, PhD., who col­lab­o­rate in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan’s Depart­ment of Psy­chi­a­try and the Mol­e­c­u­lar and Behav­ioral Neu­ro­science Insti­tute, to study the effects of nutri­tion and exer­cise on brain function.

- Greater Good Mag­a­zine, a quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine pub­lished by a UC-Berke­ley cen­ter to “high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.“ 

- Gre­go­ry Kel­lett, a recent grad­u­ate from the Cog­ni­tive Neurology/Research Psychology Masters pro­gram at SFSU.

- Eric Jensen, author of Enrich­ing the Brain: How to Max­i­mize Every Learn­er’s Poten­tial, and well-known syn­the­siz­er of brain research infor­ma­tion with impli­ca­tions for K12 education.

- Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, Ph. D., an Adjunct Fac­ul­ty at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in Saint Louis, Psy­chol­o­gy Department.

- Tom O’Brien, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in math­e­mat­ics edu­ca­tion, South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty, and author of prize-win­ning games.

- Joshua Stein­er­man, M.D., Post­doc­tor­al Clin­i­cal Fel­low in the Depart­ment of Neu­rol­o­gy at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Center.

- David Rabin­er, Ph.D., Senior Research Sci­en­tist and Direc­tor of Under­grad­u­ate Stud­ies at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. Dr. Rabin­er main­tains the high­ly-regard­ed Atten­tion Research Update.

Please Note: if you would like to become an Expert Con­trib­u­tor, [Read more…] about Announc­ing Expert Con­trib­u­tors to SharpBrains.com

Baby Boomers, Healthy Aging and Job Performance

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There has been an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about the issues relat­ed to the aging of the legal pro­fes­sion. Stephanie intro­duced us to the arti­cle “the Gray­ing Bar: let’s not for­get the ethics” by David Giacalone.

In short: sta­tis­tics about the increas­ing ratio of lawyers over 70 in active prac­tice, on the one hand, and the gen­er­al inci­dence of Alzheimer’s and oth­er demen­tias, on the oth­er, lead David to point out an increas­ing like­li­hood that some lawyers may be prac­tic­ing in less than ide­al con­di­tions for their clients, beyond a rea­son­able “brain age”. The ques­tion then becomes: who and how can solve this prob­lem, which is only going to grow giv­en demo­graph­ic trends?.

We are not legal experts, but would like to inform the debate by offer­ing 10 con­sid­er­a­tions on healthy aging and job per­for­mance from a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal point of view, that apply to all occupations:

1- We should talk more about change than about decline, as Sharon Beg­ley wrote recent­ly in her great arti­cle on The Upside of Aging — WSJ.com (sub­scrip­tion required).

We dis­cussed some of these effects with Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, who wrote his great book The Wis­dom Para­dox pre­cise­ly on this point, at The Exec­u­tive Brain and How our Minds Can Grow Stronger.

2- Some skills improve as we age: In our “Exer­cis­ing Our Brains” Class­es, we typ­i­cal­ly explain how some areas typ­i­cal­ly improve as we age, such as self-reg­u­la­tion, emo­tion­al func­tion­ing and Wis­dom (which means mov­ing from Prob­lem solv­ing to Pat­tern recog­ni­tion). As a lawyer accu­mu­lates more cas­es under his/ her belt, he or she devel­ops an auto­mat­ic “intu­ition” for solu­tions and strate­gies. As long as the envi­ron­ment does­n’t change too rapid­ly, this grow­ing wis­dom is very valuable.

3- …where­as, yes, oth­ers typ­i­cal­ly decline: [Read more…] about Baby Boomers, Healthy Aging and Job Performance