memory-clinic

News: 2012 Summit Recordings are Available/ What Participants Say

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The 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit: Opti­miz­ing Health through Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, Inno­va­tion and Data, held June 7–14th, con­cluded with a call to enhance brain health by har­ness­ing neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-based appli­ca­tions, big data plat­forms and con­sumer inter­est to aug­ment the tra­di­tional reliance on dis­ease-based phar­ma­co­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions and frag­mented clin­i­cal trials.

All ses­sions held dur­ing the 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit were record­ed, and all audio­vi­sual record­ings are avail­able now for online access until July 31th, 2013. How to Watch 2012 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Recordings:

  1. If you already have login infor­ma­tion, you can sim­ply vis­it the Sum­mit Agen­da and click on the ses­sion you want to watch
  2. If you want to order 1‑year access to Sum­mit Record­ings, Click HERE. You can order the Full Record­ings for all 4‑Days of 2012 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (includ­ing 2 days of Sum­mit, Expo Day, and Edu­ca­tional Work­shops; all for $325), or order the Record­ings cor­re­spond­ing to one par­tic­u­lar day ($150).

We are proud to report that 95% of respon­dents in a post-Sum­mit sur­vey expressed a High or Very High lev­el of sat­is­fac­tion with their Sum­mit expe­ri­ence and with the Qual­ity of Con­tent. We are even proud­er to have start­ed receiv­ing glow­ing endorse­ments from research lead­ers and indus­try inno­va­tors includ­ing: [Read more…] about News: 2012 Sum­mit Record­ings are Available/ What Par­tic­i­pants Say

Cognitive Health News Round-Up

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Round-up of inter­est­ing recent news on cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness: the field is in motion.

1) Bay­crest cre­ates Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness with $10-mil­lion Invest­ment from Ontario Gov­ern­ment (Cana­da NewsWire)

2) Cog­ni­tive tests are the best way to select med­ical stu­dents (EurekAlert)

3) High blood pres­sure hard on the aging brain (Reuters)

4) Alzheimer’s tests ben­e­fi­cial for seniors (Atlanta-Jour­nal Constitutional)

5) Demen­tia-Dread­ing Baby Boomers Spur Race to Invent Brain Games (Bloomberg)

6) Viv­i­ty Labs launch­es Fit Brains brain-train­ing game site (VentureBeat) 

7) Depres­sion and Alzheimer’s (NHS Choices)

For select­ed quotes and com­ments, [Read more…] about Cog­ni­tive Health News Round-Up

The Gregarious Brain and cognitive skills

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I find via Mind­Hacks that NYT Mag­a­zine has pub­lished a great arti­cle titled The Gre­gar­i­ous Brain, sub­ti­tled “Williams syn­drome — a genet­ic acci­dent that caus­es cog­ni­tive deficits-”. The writer, David Dobbs, does an spec­tac­u­lar job at explain­ing that syn­drome in the con­text of what cog­ni­tive skills are and how they evolved. Some sam­ple quotes:

  • “In the view of two of Bellugi’s fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tors, Albert Gal­abur­da, a Har­vard Med­ical School pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­o­gy and neu­ro­science, and Allan Reiss, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine, Nicki’s learned facil­i­ty at sports talk illus­trates a cen­tral les­son of Williams and, for that mat­ter, mod­ern genet­ics: genes (or their absence) do not hard-wire peo­ple for cer­tain behav­iors. There is no gene for under­stand­ing cal­cu­lus. But genes do shape behav­ior and per­son­al­i­ty, and they do so by cre­at­ing brain struc­tures and func­tions that favor cer­tain abil­i­ties and appetites more than others.”
  • “…This doesn’t mean that spe­cif­ic behav­iors are hard-wired. M.I.T. math majors aren’t born doing cal­cu­lus, and peo­ple with Williams don’t enter life telling sto­ries. As Allan Reiss put it: “It’s not just ‘genes make brain make behav­ior.’ You have envi­ron­ment and expe­ri­ence too. By envi­ron­ment, Reiss means less the atmos­phere of a home or a school than the end­less string of chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties that life presents any per­son start­ing at birth.”
  • (Talk­ing about when our ances­tors start­ed to live in larg­er groups) “But the big­ger groups imposed a new brain load: the mem­bers had to be smart enough to bal­ance their indi­vid­ual needs with those of the pack. This meant coop­er­at­ing and exer­cis­ing some indi­vid­ual restraint. It also required [Read more…] about The Gre­gar­i­ous Brain and cog­ni­tive skills