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Time for SharpBrains’ April e-newsletter, featuring what’s new in brain health and cognitive performance. Quite stimulating reading 🙂

New thinking

• Why Untrained Brains Are A Bit Like Puppies, And How To Put Together the Building Blocks of a Smarter, Happier Mind
• Making Stress Work for You, Instead of Against You
• 5 Facts You Need To Know To Understand, Navigate And Enjoy The Digital Brain Health Revolution
• Special Offer: Learn from 100+ Brain Experts, Watch 40+ Hours at the Leading Edge (10%-off discount code: sharp2017)

New research

• Dance training: The ultimate way to delay brain decline by combining physical, cognitive, and social engagement
• Helping bridge neuroscience and education: 30+ experts debunk the theory of fixed, rigid “learning styles”
• Parents’ educational and income levels (not breastfeeding per se) account for the brain development gains in breastfed children
• Brain stimulation can work–if properly timed
• The US Navy tests neuro-priming and other non-pharmacological aids to boost cognition and performance

New tools

• Fully concentrated on task at hand? Then your computer won’t distract you
• Augmenting physiotherapy via neurofeedback and neurostimulation: Key neurotechnology patent #43
• Elon Musk to pioneer new Inner Space Frontier via Neuralink “neural lace” technology
• In the field of neurostimulation, what comes first, Published Research or Patents?
• Enhancing cognition via brain training with a visual emphasis: Key neurotechnology patent #38

Upcoming event

• May 6th, New York City: Anticipating and Shaping the Neuropsychology of the Future

Finally, here you have 5 quick brain teasers to sharpen two key cognitive skills: attention and working memory.

Have a great month of May,

The SharpBrains Team

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As a child, I was convinced that my dad just went to work to play. My father was a neuroscientist at Baylor University, and his office was full of brightly colored blocks to test intelligence, books by MC Escher to study perception, and even a soundproof room covered in blue foam that I thought was for gymnastics Read the rest of this entry »

Image: The Yerkes-Dodson Law (YDL)

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How much stress is good for you?

In 1908, Robert Mearns Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson designed an experiment that would begin to tackle the question, “How much stress is good for you?”

The researchers tracked mice to see how stress would affect their ability to learn. Simple—yet painful, because how do you stress out mice? Read the rest of this entry »

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NO ROAD, NO trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth. No sunbeam can fly a path tortuous enough to navigate the narrow spaces between these entangled branches. All the trees of this dark forest grew from 100 billion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is destined to die.

This forest is majestic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things. Indeed, sometimes I think it is everything. Every novel and every symphony, every cruel murder and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quarrel, every joke and every sorrow — all these things come from the forest. Read the rest of this entry »

To Diagnose Mental Illness, Read the Brain (Scientific American):

Although scientists have learned a lot about the brain in the last few decades, approaches to treating mental illnesses have not kept up. As neuroscientists learn more about brain circuits, Stanford psychiatrist Amit Etkin foresees a time when diagnoses will be based on brain scans rather than symptoms Read the rest of this entry »