Large neuroimaging study finds social isolation to be an early indicator of increased dementia risk

Why do we get a buzz from being in large groups at fes­ti­vals, jubilees and oth­er pub­lic events? Accord­ing to the social brain hypoth­e­sis, it’s because the human brain specif­i­cal­ly evolved to sup­port social inter­ac­tions. Stud­ies have shown that belong­ing to a group can lead to improved well­be­ing and increased sat­is­fac­tion with life. Unfor­tu­nate­ly though, many…

Read More

Five thoughts to think about when thinking about the speed of thought

As inquis­i­tive beings, we are con­stant­ly ques­tion­ing and quan­ti­fy­ing the speed of var­i­ous things. With a fair degree of accu­ra­cy, sci­en­tists have quan­ti­fied the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed at which the earth revolves around the sun, the speed at which hum­ming­birds beat their wings, the aver­age speed of con­ti­nen­tal drift…. These…

Read More

On the perceived memory, cognitive benefits of playing casual video games

Psy­chol­o­gists Find the Per­ceived Ben­e­fits of Casu­al Video Games Among Adults (press release): “New research from psy­chol­o­gists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Amherst finds that while a major­i­ty of adults cite the abil­i­ty to com­pete with friends as their pri­ma­ry rea­son for play­ing online casu­al video games, they report dif­fer­ing per­ceived ben­e­fits from playing 

Read More

Test your Reaction Time

Reac­tion time is the time it takes to react to some­thing. It can be con­sid­ered as an index of your speed of pro­cess­ing: It shows how fast you can exe­cute the men­tal oper­a­tions need­ed by the task at hand. Reac­tion Time is a basic mea­sure used in many psy­chol­o­gy stud­ies. Par­tic­i­pant are most often asked to…

Read More

Physical and mental exercise to prevent cognitive decline

We offered some Brain Fit­ness Pre­dic­tions in our Mar­ket Report , includ­ing… “7. Doc­tors and phar­ma­cists will help patients nav­i­gate through the over­whelm­ing range of avail­able prod­ucts and inter­pret the results of cog­ni­tive assess­ments. This will require sig­nif­i­cant pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment efforts, giv­en that most doc­tors today were trained under a very dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of the…

Read More