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Long-term med­i­ta­tion tied to less brain loss (Reuters):

“Peo­ple who report­ed med­i­tat­ing for an aver­age of 20 years had high­er brain vol­umes than the aver­age per­son, researchers report in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy.

Kurth and his col­leagues write that they can’t say med­i­ta­tion caused its prac­ti­tion­ers to lose less brain vol­ume, how­ev­er. Oth­er habits of long-term med­i­ta­tors may also influ­ence brain vol­ume…

Near­ly 18 mil­lion adults and 1 mil­lion chil­dren prac­ticed med­i­ta­tion in the U.S. in 2012, Read the rest of this entry »

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Dif­fer­ent men­tal dis­or­ders cause same brain-mat­ter loss, study finds (press release):

“A meta-analy­sis of 193 brain-imag­ing stud­ies shows sim­i­lar gray-mat­ter loss in the brains of peo­ple with diag­noses as dif­fer­ent as schiz­o­phre­nia, depres­sion and addiction…The find­ings call into ques­tion a long­stand­ing ten­den­cy to dis­tin­guish psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders chiefly by their symp­toms rather than their under­ly­ing brain pathol­o­gy. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have  noticed that Amazon.com is shar­ing aggre­gat­ed data on how ebook read­ers inter­act with the books they are read­ing. For exam­ple, the “Pop­u­lar High­lights” sec­tion (towards the bot­tom of our Kin­dle book page) ranks the Top 10 sen­tences that Kin­dle read­ers have high­light­ed and shared while read­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp (April 2009; 182 pages; ranked #1 in Kin­dle Store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine sec­tion).

This infor­ma­tion is invalu­able to authors and pub­lish­ers — as you can imag­ine, we’ll make sure to not only main­tain but to elab­o­rate on these top­ics as we pre­pare future edi­tions of the book.

So, what are so far the Top Ten Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, Read the rest of this entry »

We just noticed that the Alliance for Aging Research offers an excel­lent list of ref­er­ences on Brain Health Research, orga­nized in these 10 sec­tions below. Enjoy!

#1 Nour­ish Your Nog­gin: Eat a Brain Healthy Diet Read the rest of this entry »

In the lat­est issue of Neu­rol­o­gy a study by Erick­son et al. (2010) sug­gests that walk­ing reg­u­lar­ly can increase brain vol­ume and reduce the risks of devel­op­ing cog­ni­tive impair­ment.

The researchers stared with 2 mains facts:

• Gray mat­ter vol­ume shrinks with age, often lead­ing to cog­ni­tive decline.
• Phys­i­cal exer­cise seems to be neu­ro-pro­tec­tor (see our pre­vi­ous post: Fit­ter bod­ies = fit­ter brains. True at all ages?)

They asked 2 ques­tions:

• Can phys­i­cal activ­i­ty assessed ear­li­er pre­dict gray mat­ter vol­ume 9 years lat­er?
• Is greater gray mat­ter vol­ume asso­ci­at­ed with reduced risks of devel­op­ing cog­ni­tive impair­ment?

Read the rest of this entry »