Update: How Stress and Emotions Impact Brain Performance

Spon­sored Ad (How to Adver­tise on SharpBrains.com) Time for the Octo­ber edi­tion of the month­ly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing this time sev­er­al arti­cles on the impact of stress, emo­tions, and self-reg­u­la­­tion, on our brain’s struc­ture and per­for­mance. We are pleased to bring to Sharp­Brains read­ers a new 6‑part series on the Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress, based on a…

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Study: Music Training Can Enhance Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function

Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Short-Term Music Train­ing Enhances Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion. Abstract: Researchers have designed train­ing meth­ods that can be used to improve men­tal health and to test the effi­ca­cy of edu­ca­tion pro­grams. How­ev­er, few stud­ies have demon­strat­ed broad trans­fer from such train­ing to per­for­mance on untrained cog­ni­tive activities.…

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Playing Music as a Protection Against Dementia

In a recent post we saw that music may help peo­ple with demen­tia learn new facts. This arti­cle explores anoth­er rela­tion­ship between music and demen­tia: play­ing a musi­cal instru­ment, even as an ama­teur, may pro­tect the brain lat­er on against demen­­tia-relat­ed dam­ages. Researchers had 70 peo­ple ages 60 to 83 per­form a vari­ety of tests…

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Music: Another Pillar of Brain Fitness?

Musi­cians’ brains are often used as mod­els of neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty. Indeed, numer­ous stud­ies to date have shown that musi­cal train­ing can change the brain. Musi­cians have larg­er brain vol­ume in areas that are impor­tant for play­ing an instru­ment: motor, audi­to­ry and visuo-spa­­tial regions. A recent Nature Review Neu­ro­science arti­cle shows that music train­ing can ben­e­fit the…

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Do we need more music education?

We recent­ly pub­lished an arti­cle exam­in­ing the “Mozart effect” and the con­clu­sions were that there is very lit­tle evi­dence that lis­ten­ing to music does boost men­tal func­tions. How­ev­er learn­ing to play an instru­ment does seem to do the trick. In this recent Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can arti­cle, the edi­tors point out that:

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Brain Scientists Identify Links between Arts, Learning

Arts edu­ca­tion influ­ences learn­ing and oth­er areas of cog­ni­tion and may deserve a more promi­nent place in schools, accord­ing to a wave of recent neu­ro­science research.One recent study found that chil­dren who receive music instruc­tion for just 15 months show strength­ened con­nec­tions in musi­cal­ly rel­e­vant brain areas and per­form bet­ter on asso­ci­at­ed tasks, com­pared with…

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