Neuroscience Interview Series

Brain Fitness Blog Carnival #2

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Wel­come to the Feb­ru­ary 19, 2007 edi­tion of brain fitness.

Today we want to high­light an excel­lent Inter­view with Aaron Beck on the His­to­ry of Cog­ni­tive Ther­a­py sub­mit­ted by the Beck Insti­tute. Dr. Beck was 83 when he gave this inter­view. To the ques­tion “Do you have a view about age­ing?”, he responds “I can only speak for myself. I know that prac­ti­cal­ly all my col­leagues from med­ical school days who are still around have retired. That is not some­thing that I think about. It is no more on my hori­zon now than it was when we first met a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago. I keep look­ing ahead.” He also says “I have always liked to uni­fy dif­fer­ent fields. Giv­en my back­ground in neu­rol­o­gy I do not see a con­flict between neu­rol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy. But if you look at the train­ing of con­tem­po­rary psy­chi­a­trists, for exam­ple, the two domains are total­ly dis­tinct. If psy­chi­a­try is to sur­vive as a dis­ci­pline, a merg­ing of the con­cepts of neu­rol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy will need to occur.” [Read more…] about Brain Fit­ness Blog Car­ni­val #2

Brain Health Newsletter, February Edition, and Brain Awareness Week

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We hope you are enjoy­ing the grow­ing cov­er­age of Brain Fit­ness as much as we are. Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago-you can sub­scribe to this month­ly email update in the box on the right hand side.

In this post, we will briefly cover:

I. Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chica­go Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.

II. Events: we are out­reach part­ners for the Learn­ing & the Brain con­fer­ence, which will gath­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists and edu­ca­tors, and for the Dana Foundation’s Brain Aware­ness Week.

III. Pro­gram Reviews: The Wall Street Jour­nal reviewed six dif­fer­ent pro­grams for brain exer­cise and aging, and the one we offer is one of the two win­ners. A col­lege-lev­el coun­sel­ing cen­ter starts offer­ing our stress man­age­ment one. And we inter­view a Notre Dame sci­en­tist who has con­duct­ed a repli­ca­tion study for the work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing pro­gram for kids with ADD/ ADHD.

IV. New Offer­ings: we have start­ed to offer two infor­ma­tion pack­ages that can be very use­ful for peo­ple who want to bet­ter under­stand this field before they com­mit to any par­tic­u­lar pro­gram: learn more about our Brain Fit­ness 101 guide and Exer­cise Your Brain DVD.

V. Web­site and Blog Sum­ma­ry: we revamped our home page and have had a very busy month writ­ing many good arti­cles. We also host­ed two “Blog Carnivals”- don’t you want to know what that means?
[Read more…] about Brain Health Newslet­ter, Feb­ru­ary Edi­tion, and Brain Aware­ness Week

MindFit and Posit Science in the Wall Street Journal’s “Putting Brain Exercises to the Test”

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The Wall Street Jour­nal has a great arti­cle today, Putting Brain Exer­cis­es to the Test (requires sub­scrip­tion), that com­pares 6 dif­fer­ent com­put­er-based brain exer­cise pro­grams along ease-of-use, fun, and sci­ence behind. We at Sharp­Brains con­duct­ed a very sim­i­lar exer­cise last year, com­ing to basi­cal­ly the same conclusions.

The arti­cle com­pares Nin­ten­do Brain Age, MyBrain­Builder, MyBrain­Train­er, Hap­pyNeu­ron, (Cog­niFit Sci­ence) Mind­Fit and Posit Sci­ence brain fit­ness 2.0, and ends up rec­om­mend­ing [Read more…] about Mind­Fit and Posit Sci­ence in the Wall Street Journal’s “Putting Brain Exer­cis­es to the Test”

Cogmed Working Memory Training (RoboMemo) Founder: Award for Dr. Torkel Klingberg

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Dr. Torkel KlingbergWe want to con­grat­u­late Dr. Torkel Kling­berg, pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute and one of the founders of our part­ner Cogmed, on receiv­ing the Philip’s Nordic Prize for his research on work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing for chil­dren diag­nosed with Atten­tion Deficit Hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty Dis­or­der (ADHD).

The prize rec­og­nizes out­stand­ing research in the field of neu­ropsy­chi­a­try and was pre­sent­ed by the Nor­we­gian roy­al princess Martha Louise at the Rik­shos­pi­tal in Oslo, Nor­way. Trans­lat­ing his research into an active train­ing pro­gram, Kling­berg co-found­ed Cogmed, a devel­op­er of soft­ware-based work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing prod­ucts head­quar­tered in Stock­holm. Cogmed’s rig­or­ous and reward­ing pro­gram com­bines com­put­er-based train­ing and per­son­al coach­ing to help peo­ple with atten­tion deficits strength­en their work­ing mem­o­ries. More than 80 per­cent of chil­dren who have com­plet­ed Cogmed’s inten­sive five-week pro­gram have demon­strat­ed dra­mat­ic and last­ing improve­ments to their atten­tion, impulse con­trol and prob­lem solv­ing skills.

[Read more…] about Cogmed Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing (RoboMemo) Founder: Award for Dr. Torkel Klingberg

Neuroscience Interview Series: on learning and “brain gyms”

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Giv­en that we are get­ting new read­ers let’s re-intro­duce our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series. If you click on the cat­e­go­ry (in the right bar) that says Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series, you will find the updat­ed list of inter­views we have con­duct­ed (and also some that we have found else­where, such as the one with Posit Sci­ence’s Dr. Michael Merzenich and Dr. John Ratey).

The inter­views we have con­duct­ed and pub­lished so far, with most recent first:

And we have a few more inter­views in the works-please keep tuned.

Enjoy!

New Brain Fitness Guide

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Sharp BrainWe are very excit­ed to announce our new­ly released Brain Fit­ness for Sharp Brains: Your New New Year Res­o­lu­tion. We wrote it in order to pro­vide an intro­duc­tion to the con­cept, sci­ence, and prac­tice of brain fit­ness in plain Eng­lish, by answer­ing the Top 25 ques­tions we have received over the last four months. Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, Alvaro Fer­nan­dez and myself (Car­o­line) have been work­ing hard on this.

You can click here to get your copy of the com­plete guide. Oth­er­wise, keep check­ing back this blog, as we will pub­lish a new ques­tion and its answer every Mon­day and Thurs­day before 9AM Pacif­ic Stan­dard Time. If we missed your press­ing ques­tion, let us know!

Here is a sneak pre­view of the ques­tions we will be answering …

[Read more…] about New Brain Fit­ness Guide