Tracking Health and Wellness Applications of Brain Science

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Brain Exercise: Software vs. Crosswords

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Today I had a great con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Buschkuehl, one of the U Michi­gan researchers involved in the cog­ni­tive train­ing study that has received much media atten­tion since ear­ly last week, when the study was pub­lished at the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

I will pub­lish the inter­view notes next week. For the moment, let me para­phrase his answer to the ques­tion: “Why are com­put­er­ized pro­grams like the one you used fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from, say, sim­ply doing many cross­word puzzles?”.

[Read more…] about Brain Exer­cise: Soft­ware vs. Crosswords

Brain News: Software, Education, Arts

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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!

Placebo effect: why not more of it?

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Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Sto­ry of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy News Dai­ly. As part of the sto­ry, she men­tions a very fun study on the pow­er of the Place­bo effect.

From Seni­a’s post:

“Hotel WorkerIn the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum report­ed that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon Gen­er­al’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vid­ed. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks lat­er, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group had­n’t changed phys­i­cal­ly, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­o­ry that exer­cise affects health at least part­ly due to the place­bo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­den­ly believe that they active­ly affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the place­bo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent oth­er peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the place­bo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, should­n’t we try to “place­bo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is anoth­er man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tion­al self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend