Brain Health/ Brain Training News

Roundup of inter­est­ing news in this emerg­ing field: 1) Brain Health Lead­ers Team Up to Pre­vent Crash­es. 2) Adults Improve Crit­i­cal Pro­fes­sion­al and Per­son­al Skills Through New Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Pro­gram. 3) Nature Neu­ro­science Pod­cast and Lon­don Taxi Dri­vers. 4) What Have You Changed Your Mind About, late­ly?. 5) The 2008 Mind & Life Sum­mer Research Institute…

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From Meditation to MBSR

Very nice Los Ange­les Times arti­cle on the grow­ing research behind, and accep­tance of, med­i­ta­tion in main­stream med­i­cine (through what is called Mind­­ful­­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion, or MBSR): Doc­tor’s orders: Cross your legs and say ‘Om’. A few quotes: — “It appears to work. In a new study, pub­lished in Octo­ber in the jour­nal Pain, Natalia…

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Enhancing Cognition and Emotions for Learning — Learning & The Brain Conference

Alvaro and I had the good for­tune to attend a great con­fer­ence last week called Learn­ing & The Brain: Enhanc­ing Cog­ni­tion and Emo­tions for Learn­ing.… Some top­ics were meant to be applied imme­di­ate­ly, but many were food for thought — dis­cus­sions on where sci­ence and edu­ca­tion are headed.Using dra­mat­ic new imag­ing tech­niques, such as fMRIs, PET, and SPECT, neu­ro­sci­en­tists are gain­ing valu­able infor­ma­tion about learn­ing. This pio­neer­ing knowl­edge is lead­ing not only to new ped­a­go­gies, but also to new med­ica­tions, brain enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies, and ther­a­pies. Dis­cov­er how new adven­tures could change edu­ca­tion, learn­ing dis­or­der inter­ven­tions, and even soci­ety itself in the future.

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Student Achievement Gap, Stress, and Self-Regulation

Jon­ah Lehrer dis­sects and builds on a New York Times arti­cle on the edu­ca­tion Achieve­ment gap. Quotes from Jon­ah’s post: “most of the research sug­gests that the “achieve­ment gap” has real neu­ro­log­i­cal roots, which are caused by dis­tinct home envi­ron­ments: Hart and Ris­ley showed that lan­guage expo­sure in ear­ly child­hood cor­re­lat­ed strong­ly with I.Q. and academic…

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