Travel and Engagement as Good Brain Exercise

By Alvaro Fernandez | December 15, 2007 |

Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty is defined as “the abil­i­ty of the brain to rewire itself through expe­ri­ence”. We typ­i­cal­ly sum­ma­rize a lot of brain research by encour­ag­ing Sharp­Brains read­ers is to seek for nov­el­ty, vari­ety and chal­lenge, as guide­lines for “brain exer­cise” that will help build new con­nec­tions in the brain, force one to be mind­ful and pay…

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Use It or Lose It, and Cells that Fire together Wire together

By Alvaro Fernandez | November 25, 2007 |

Every­one has heard of “Use It or Lose It.” Now…what is “It”? Last week I gave a talk at the Ital­ian Con­sulate in San Fran­cis­co, and one of the areas atten­dees seemed to enjoy the most was learn­ing about what our brains are and how they work, peak­ing into the “black box” of our minds. With­out understanding…

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Cognitive Development and Brain Research: Articles, Books, Papers (ASA)

By Alvaro Fernandez | October 28, 2007 |

We had a very fun ses­sion titled Teach­ing Brain Fit­ness in Your Com­mu­ni­ty at an Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging (ASA) con­fer­ence for health pro­fes­sion­als a cou­ple of weeks ago. Full house, with over 60 atten­dants and very good par­tic­i­pa­tion, show­ing great inter­est in the top­ic. I can’t wait to see the eval­u­a­tions. These are some…

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Nintendo BrainAge, Lumosity, Happy Neuron, MyBrainTrainer…

By Alvaro Fernandez | July 17, 2007 |

A col­lec­tion of recent announce­ment in the “brain games” or “brain train­ing games” space: The Wii sets new gen­er­a­tional stan­dards for the videogame indus­try “The age­ing of the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion com­pelled gamemak­er Nin­ten­do to widen its audi­ence. Now, the Wii is lead­ing the indus­try stan­dards. But hard­core gamers are still too impor­tant to be neglected.”…

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Are yoga and meditation good for my brain?

By Caroline Latham | February 15, 2007 |

Here is ques­tion 16 of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Questions.Question:Are yoga and med­i­ta­tion good for my brain?Key Points: Yoga, med­i­ta­tion, and visu­al­iza­tion are all excel­lent ways to learn to man­age your stress levels.Reducing stress, and the stress hor­mones, in your sys­tem is crit­i­cal to your brain and over­all fitness.Answer:Yes.… the zebra releas­es the stress hor­mones through life-pre­serv­ing action, while we usu­al­ly just keep mud­dling along, get­ting more anx­ious by the moment.Prolonged expo­sure to the adren­al steroid hor­mones like cor­ti­sol, released dur­ing the stress response, can dam­age the brain and block the for­ma­tion of new neu­rons in the hip­pocam­pus, which is the key play­er in encod­ing new mem­o­ries in your brain.

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