Musical training as mental exercise for cognitive performance

We often hear (glad­ly!) how teach­ers use our blog arti­cles and brain teasers in their class­es. We also hear how many psy­chol­o­gy and biol­o­gy teach­ers are get­ting their stu­dents excit­ed about brain research, and, to con­tribute to their efforts, we like to rec­og­nize some great ini­tia­tives. Last year, Jef­frey Gonce, a Psy­chol­o­gy teacher at Red…

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A very sharp brain: Prof. Hans Rosling

A few years ago I had the chance to meet  Hans Rosling at a sum­mit by the Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship. He is a Pro­fes­sor of Inter­na­tion­al Health who devel­oped Tren­d­a­lyz­er soft­ware, a tool that brings sta­tis­tics to live with great visu­al and ani­ma­tion tech­niques. Google bought the soft­ware last March. You can find it here now.…

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TED Conference wants more brains and synapses

TED Con­fer­ence, a great annu­al con­fer­ence on any­thing and every­thing new and mean­ing­ful, announces the pub­lic launch of their revamped web­site with great con­tent and social net­work­ing tools, all under the ban­ner “Ideas worth spread­ing”. You can exer­cise your mind by learn­ing about most sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy sub­jects through won­der­ful TEDTalks video clips. Some examples:…

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