SmartBrains, Becoming Smarter, and Intelligence

By Alvaro Fernandez | August 31, 2007 |

The MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review September/ Octo­ber edi­tion brings an arti­cle by Daniel Den­nett titled High­er Games: It’s been 10 years since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gar­ry Kas­parov in chess. A promi­nent philoso­pher asks what the match meant (sub­scrip­tion required), which is cre­at­ing a lot of buzz on the sci­ence blo­gos­phere on whether humans or machines…

Read More

Brain Health Newsletter, February Edition, and Brain Awareness Week

By Caroline Latham | February 17, 2007 |

Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chica­go Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.Website and Blog Summary.We hope you enjoy our new Home Page.Cognitive Neu­ro­science­Brain Fit­ness Glos­saryCog­ni­tive Reserve and Lifestyle­Heart Rate Vari­abil­i­ty as an Index of Reg­u­lat­ed Emo­tion­al Respond­ingNeu­ro­science Inter­view Series: on learn­ing and “brain gyms“EducationCounseling cen­ter offers biofeed­back to help decrease stressLife­long learn­ing, lit­er­al­ly: neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty for stu­dents, boomers, seniors…Health & Well­ness­Want to Improve Mem­o­ry?… Do I need any­thing else?Learning Slows Phys­i­cal Pro­gres­sion of Alzheimer’s Dis­ease­Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­mentIm­prov­ing Your Brain Tools: Read­ing Emo­tion­al Mes­sages in the FaceEn­hanc­ing the Trader’s Self-Control.Brain Teasers.Exercise Your Brains — Visu­al Log­ic Brain Teaser­Brain Work­out for Your Frontal Lobes­Blog Car­ni­vals: col­lec­tion of best blog arti­cles around par­tic­u­lar topics.We host­ed Encephalon #15: Neu­ro­science and Psy­chol­o­gy Blog Carnival.And launched Brain Fit­ness Blog Car­ni­val #1.

Read More

Heart Rate Variability as an Index of Regulated Emotional Responding

By Caroline Latham | February 11, 2007 |

Con­tin­u­ing with the theme of a Week of Sci­ence spon­sored by Just Sci­ence, we will high­light some of the key points in: Appel­hans BM, Lueck­en LJ. Heart Rate Vari­abil­i­ty as an Index of Reg­u­lat­ed Emo­tion­al Respond­ing. Review of Gen­er­al Psy­chol­o­gy. 2006;10:229–240. Effec­tive emo­tion­al reg­u­la­tion depends on being able to flex­i­bly adjust your phys­i­o­log­i­cal response to a chang­ing envi­ron­ment moment by moment.Heart rate vari­abil­i­ty (HRV) is a mea­sure of the con­tin­u­ous inter­play between sym­pa­thet­ic and parasym­pa­thet­ic influ­ences on heart rate that yields infor­ma­tion about auto­nom­ic flex­i­bil­i­ty and there­by rep­re­sents the capac­i­ty for reg­u­lat­ed emo­tion­al responding.

Read More

Learning & The Brain Conference, February 15–17th in San Francisco

By Alvaro Fernandez | February 7, 2007 |

For infor­ma­tion on the 2008 Con­fer­ence, and the dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers, vis­it: Learn­ing & The Brain Con­fer­ence: dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers. The post below refers to the 2007 Con­fer­ence: ————————- The orga­niz­ers of this amaz­ing con­fer­ence, whose reg­is­tra­tion is about to expire, just extend­ed their very kind offer to Sharp­Brains read­ers: you can register…

Read More

Cognitive Reserve and Lifestyle

By Caroline Latham | February 6, 2007 |

In hon­or of the Week of Sci­ence pre­sent­ed at Just Sci­ence we will be writ­ing about “just science”.Today, we will high­light the key points in an excel­lent review of cog­ni­tive reserve: Today, we will high­light the key points in an excel­lent review of cog­ni­tive reserve: Scarmeas, Niko­laos and Stern, Yaakov. Cog­ni­tive reserve and lifestyle. Jour­nal of Clin­i­cal and Exper­i­men­tal Neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy. 2003;25:625–33.The con­cept of cog­ni­tive reserve has been defined as the abil­i­ty of an indi­vid­ual to tol­er­ate pro­gres­sive brain pathol­o­gy with­out demon­strat­ing clin­i­cal cog­ni­tive symp­toms. Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests that indi­vid­u­als with high­er IQ, edu­ca­tion, occu­pa­tion­al achieve­ment, or par­tic­i­pa­tion in intel­lec­tu­al­ly and social­ly active lifestyles may result in both quan­ti­ta­tive­ly more cog­ni­tive net­works and qual­i­ta­tive­ly more func­tion­al­ly effi­cient net­works result­ing in more reserve.

Read More

MindFit and Posit Science in the Wall Street Journal’s “Putting Brain Exercises to the Test”

By Alvaro Fernandez | February 3, 2007 |

The Wall Street Jour­nal has a great arti­cle today, Putting Brain Exer­cis­es to the Test (requires sub­scrip­tion), that com­pares 6 dif­fer­ent com­put­er-based brain exer­cise pro­grams along ease-of-use, fun, and sci­ence behind. We at Sharp­Brains con­duct­ed a very sim­i­lar exer­cise last year, com­ing to basi­cal­ly the same con­clu­sions. The arti­cle com­pares Nin­ten­do Brain Age, MyBrain­Builder, MyBrainTrainer,…

Read More