10 Brain Fitness New Year’s Resolutions

By SharpBrains | December 31, 2007 |

You have sur­vived the 2007 shop­ping and eat­ing sea­son. Con­grat­u­la­tions! Now it’s time to shift gears and focus on 2008…whether you write down some New Year res­o­lu­tions or con­tem­plate some things that you want to let go of from last year and set inten­tions and goals for this year — as is a friend’s tradition…

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Gratitude and Appreciation: from Theory to Practice

By Alvaro Fernandez | December 7, 2007 |

Psy­chol­o­gist Robert Emmons recent­ly told us about the many ben­e­fits of prac­tic­ing grat­i­tude. — “First, the prac­tice of grat­i­tude can increase hap­pi­ness lev­els by around 25%. Sec­ond, this is not hard to achieve — a few hours spent writ­ing a grat­i­tude jour­nal over 3 weeks can cre­ate an effect that lasts 6 months if not…

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Brain Fitness Newsletter: November Edition

By Alvaro Fernandez | November 30, 2007 |

Here you are have the Month­ly Digest of our Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. You can con­sid­er it your month­ly Brain Exer­cise Mag­a­zine. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, check our Top­ics sec­tion, and sub­scribe to our month­ly newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this…

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Is physical fitness important to your brain fitness?

By Caroline Latham | February 26, 2007 |

Here is ques­tion 18 of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Questions.Question:Is phys­i­cal fit­ness important?Key Points: Exer­cise improves learn­ing through increased blood sup­ply and growth hormones.Exercise is an anti-depres­sant by reduc­ing stress and pro­mot­ing neurogenesis.Exercise pro­tects the brain from dam­age and dis­ease, as well speed­ing the recovery.Answer:Yes. Accord­ing to Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Insti­tute for Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies, “We now know that exer­cise helps gen­er­ate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.”According to the research of Richard Smeyne, PhD at Saint Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal in Mem­phis, with just two months of exer­cise there are more brain cells and that high­er lev­els of exer­cise were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more ben­e­fi­cial than low­er amounts, although any exer­cise was bet­ter than none.

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