Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how

By Alvaro Fernandez | May 13, 2008 |

Today I had a great con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Buschkuehl, one of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Cog­ni­tive Neu­roimag­ing Lab researchers  involved in the cog­ni­tive train­ing study that has received much media atten­tion (New York Times, Wired, Sci­ence News…) since late April, when the study was pub­lished at the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. Reference:…

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Brain Fitness Update: Use It and Improve It

By Alvaro Fernandez | April 30, 2008 |

Here you are have the bi-mon­th­­ly update with our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter, at the top of this page, if you want to receive this digest by email). In this edi­tion of our newslet­ter we bring a few arti­cles and…

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Memory Training and Fluid Intelligence

By Alvaro Fernandez | April 29, 2008 |

Quick update: 2 very inter­est­ing news, 2 excel­lent blog car­ni­vals. 1) For­get Brain Age: Researchers Devel­op Soft­ware That Makes You Smarter (Wired). Thanks Senia! — “In a lim­it­ed tri­al, he and his team were able to make 34 test sub­jects sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter at answer­ing IQ test ques­tions after train­ing them on a com­plete­ly sep­a­rate mem­o­ry task”

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Neuroplasticity 101 and Brain Health Glossary

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 10, 2007 |

Giv­en the grow­ing num­ber of arti­cles in the pop­u­lar press men­tion­ing words such as “neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty”, “fMRI” and “cog­ni­tive reserve”, let’s review some key find­ings, con­cepts and terms. First, a pre­scient quote by Span­ish neu­ro­sci­en­tist San­ti­a­go Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934): “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor his own brain”. Thanks to new neuroimaging…

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MindFit by CogniFit, and Baroness Susan Greenfield

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 8, 2007 |

We are glad to see that Mind­Fit is final­ly mak­ing it into the pop­u­lar press, at least in the UK. The pro­gram is mak­ing big news in the UK (BBC, Times, Dai­ly Telegragh, Guardian…) because Baroness Susan Green­field, direc­tor of the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion and a well-respec­t­ed neu­ro­sci­en­tist, is endors­ing it. We eval­u­at­ed it last year…

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11 Neuroscientists Debunk a Common Myth about Brain Training

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 6, 2007 |

Last Mon­day, NPR (very good US-based radio sta­tion) had a pro­gram on “do brain train­ing pro­grams work?” that reflect­ed very old-fash­ioned think­ing. In short, the guest speak­ers talked and talked about the impor­tance of nutri­tion and phys­i­cal exer­cise (both very impor­tant, as we have cov­ered in this blog mul­ti­ple times), and expressed skep­ti­cism about the…

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