social-network

John Todor: To reach brain potential, we need less individual “improv”

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John-Todor
John I. Todor

What is your cur­rent job title and orga­ni­za­tion, and what excites you the most about work­ing there?
As the Co-Founder of Living55Plus.com, I enjoy the oppor­tu­ni­ty to curate the new research show­ing how lifestyle impacts men­tal, phys­i­cal and social well-being, and to help build a com­mu­ni­ty to share every­day experiences.

Please tell us about your inter­est in applied brain sci­ence. What areas are you most inter­est­ed in? What moti­vat­ed you to pur­sue work in your field?
My Ph.D. is in Edu­ca­tion­al Psy­chol­o­gy, fol­lowed by post-doc­tor­al work in cog­ni­tive sci­ence and clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy. I am most inter­est­ed in uncov­er­ing how lifestyles, what we do day in and out and how we do it, includ­ing our jobs, con­tribute to well-being. How can we devel­op and apply meth­ods to help peo­ple adopt healthy lifestyles and replace tox­ic behav­iors? [Read more…] about John Todor: To reach brain poten­tial, we need less indi­vid­ual “improv”

More Friends, Bigger Brain

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Editor’s Note: We are pleased to bring you this arti­cle by Sian Beilock, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Greater Good Mag­a­zine. (Pic by Leigh Wells)

Ever won­der why some peo­ple have more friends than oth­ers? Why some run in large and com­plex social cir­cles while oth­ers have a small group of acquain­tances? There are no doubt a vari­ety of fac­tors that influ­ence the extent of our social net­works. New research shows, how­ev­er, that one fac­tor we may not have con­sid­ered before is right inside our head.

In a paper pub­lished recent­ly in Nature Neu­ro­science, researchers showed that the num­ber of friends we have could be pre­dict­ed by the size of our amygdala—a small, almond-shaped region locat­ed deep inside our brains. [Read more…] about More Friends, Big­ger Brain