Brain Fitness Newsletter: mid-February Edition

Our Jan­u­ary Newslet­ter received a good deal of feed­back from many read­ers. Based on it, our new approach is to select the top 10 most impor­tant arti­cles every oth­er week. Please take a look at this first exper­i­ment, and let us know you feed­back. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS…

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Are Schools (Cognitively) Nutritive for Children’s Complex Thinking?

Today we host a very stim­u­lat­ing essay on the impor­tance of prob­lem-solv­ing and encour­ag­ing com­plex game-play­ing for chil­dren’s com­plete “cog­ni­tive nutri­tion”. Enjoy! ——————– Chil­dren’s Com­plex Think­ing – By Tom O’Brien and Chris­tine Wal­lach Pop over to your neigh­bor­hood school and vis­it some class­rooms. Is what’s hap­pen­ing cog­ni­tive­ly nutri­tive? That is, does it sat­is­fy present needs…

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Learning & The Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

Dr. Robert Syl­west­er is an edu­ca­tor of edu­ca­tors, hav­ing received mul­ti­ple awards dur­ing his long career as a mas­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tor of the impli­ca­tions of brain sci­ence research for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. He is the author of sev­er­al books and many jour­nal arti­cles, and mem­ber of our Sci­en­tif­ic Advi­so­ry Board. His most recent book is The…

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Memory, Cognitive Abilities and Executive Functions

A mis­con­cep­tion we encounter often is that “mem­o­ry” is the only, or most impor­tant, “thing” that our brains do. And the only one we need to care for. We have a vari­ety of cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, from atten­tion to pro­cess­ing speed to prob­lem-solv­ing to emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­­tion to, yes, mem­o­ry. (And more). Even mem­o­ry is not one whole…

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TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), Iraq and neuropsychology

You prob­a­bly have seen the news about Bob Woodruf­f’s own recov­ery and his arti­cles now to raise aware­ness about the plight of Iraq veterans.In the arti­cle A First­hand Report on the Wounds of War we learn how “Woodruff, 45, is launch­ing a mul­ti­me­dia cam­paign that includes appear­ances Tues­day with Oprah Win­frey and on “Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca,” and the release of a book (“ In an Instant”) writ­ten with his wife, Lee, about their ordeal.”“Woodruff’s report­ing packs an emo­tion­al punch because he is, quite sim­ply, a man who cheat­ed death.… dis­cuss­es what a great work the mil­i­tary is doing to pre­vent deaths of injured sol­diers in Iraq-with the unin­tend­ed con­se­quence that reha­bil­i­ta­tion ser­vices back in the US are com­plete­ly overwhelmed.Neurophilosopher puts this prob­lem in a wider con­text with DoD is neglect­ing troops’ men­tal health.For a bet­ter pre­spec­tive, this is a quote from our inter­view with Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Cog­ni­tive Train­ing, talk­ing about the birth of mod­ern neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy dur­ing World War II:“Of course there weren’t advanced neu­roimag­ing tech­niques those days, so sci­en­tists could only spec­u­late about what hap­pened in healthy brains.

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