Merzenich

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