PDF-journal

Brain News: Software, Education, Arts

by

A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to trav­el. I par­tic­i­pat­ed yes­ter­day in a fun pan­el dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to vis­it our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The Nation­al Muse­um of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent relat­ed resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Cognitive Neuroscience @ MIT OpenCourseWare

by

The great MIT Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive offers a lot of free mate­ri­als on Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences. You can browse lec­ture notes, read­ings, and more on a vari­ety of psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science courses.

  • “The human brain is the most com­plex, sophis­ti­cat­ed, and pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing device known. To study its com­plex­i­ties, the Depart­ment of Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy com­bines the exper­i­men­tal tech­nolo­gies of neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, neu­ro­science, and psy­chol­o­gy, with the the­o­ret­i­cal pow­er that comes from the fields of com­pu­ta­tion­al neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive science.”
  • “The Depart­ment was found­ed by Hans-Lukas Teu­ber in 1964 as a Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, with the then-rad­i­cal vision that the study of brain and mind are insep­a­ra­ble. Today, at a time of increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion, our goal remains to under­stand cog­ni­tion- its process­es, and its mech­a­nisms at the lev­el of mol­e­cules, neu­rons, net­works of neu­rons, and cog­ni­tive mod­ules. We are unique among neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive sci­ence depart­ments in our breadth, and in the scope of our ambi­tion. We span a very large range of inquiry into the brain and mind, and our work bridges many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis includ­ing mol­e­c­u­lar, cel­lu­lar, sys­tems, com­pu­ta­tion­al and cog­ni­tive approaches.”

There is a fas­ci­nat­ing new course titled A Clin­i­cal Approach to the Human Brain, Fall 2006, includ­ing Top­ics and Lec­ture Sum­maries such as

  • “Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: Teach­ing Old Dogs New Tricks. A sur­pris­ing dis­cov­ery in the last few years in neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy has been that neu­rons are born, neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, in the adult mam­malian brain. Ini­tial­ly, this had been shown in ani­mals and, more recent­ly, in the humans hip­pocam­pus, the site of declar­a­tive mem­o­ry for­ma­tion. (See Gree­nough). Fur­ther­more, the rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis in ani­mals has been enhanced by expe­ri­ence, both phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and liv­ing in enriched envi­ron­ments (See [Read more…] about Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science @ MIT OpenCourseWare