The-Adolescent-Brain

New Brain Health Series: The Child, Adolescent, Adult and Aging Brain

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Peo­ple of all ages read SharpBrains.com, so we are prepar­ing a series of arti­cles on Brain Health across the Lifes­pan.

The series will include 4 parts:

  • The Child Brain, pub­lished in Novem­ber 2010
  • The Ado­les­cent Brain, in Decem­ber 2010
  • The Adult Brain, in Jan­u­ary 2011
  • The Aging Brain, in Feb­ru­ary 2011

    • Each part will :

    • Include sur­pris­ing facts on how the brain works
    • Debunk com­mons myths about cog­ni­tion and brain health
    • Link to resources such as books and documentaries.

    If you want to read these arti­cles as we pub­lish them via SharpBrains.com, you can either fol­low us in Face­book and Twit­ter or, if you have not done so already, sub­scribe to our month­ly update (eNewslet­ter).

    Tell your friends and col­leagues about the series!

    Learning & The Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

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    Robert SylwesterDr. 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 Ado­les­cent Brain: Reach­ing for Auton­o­my (Cor­win Press, 2007). He is an Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oregon.

    I am hon­ored to inter­view him today.

    Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Let’s start with that eter­nal source of debate. What do we know about the respec­tive roles of genes and our envi­ron­ment in brain devel­op­ment?

    Robert Syl­west­er: Genet­ic and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors both con­tribute to brain mat­u­ra­tion. Genet­ics prob­a­bly play a stronger role in the ear­ly years, and the envi­ron­ment plays a stronger role in lat­er years. Still the moth­er’s (envi­ron­men­tal) use of drugs dur­ing the preg­nan­cy could affect the genet­ics of fetal brain devel­op­ment, and some adult ill­ness­es, such as Hunt­ing­ton’s Dis­ease, are genet­i­cal­ly triggered.

    Nature and nur­ture both require the sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions of the oth­er in most devel­op­men­tal and main­te­nance func­tions. We typ­i­cal­ly think of envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors as things that hap­pen to us, over which we have lit­tle control.

    Can’t our own deci­sions have an effect in our own brain devel­op­ment? For exam­ple, what if I choose a career in invest­ment bank­ing, vs. one in jour­nal­ism or teaching?

    We make our own career deci­sions in life, and most of us make a com­bi­na­tion of good and bad deci­sions, which influ­ence our brain’s maturation.

    My father was very unusu­al in his career tra­jec­to­ry in that he worked at one place through­out his entire adult life, and died three months after he retired at 91. I’ve always thought that it’s a good idea to make a change every ten years or so and do some­thing dif­fer­ent either with­in the same orga­ni­za­tion or to move to anoth­er one.

    It’s just as good for orga­ni­za­tions to have some staff turnover as it is for staff to move to new chal­lenges. The time to leave one posi­tion for anoth­er is while you and your employ­er are [Read more…] about Learn­ing & The Brain: Inter­view with Robert Sylwester

    Exercising Your Lexical Recall and Pattern Recognition

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    Crossword Puzzle
    I was sent these links to a free online cross­word puz­zle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excel­lent com­put­er-based brain fit­ness pro­grams avail­able, puz­zles can still be good men­tal exer­cise … they are just not a com­plete work­out for your whole brain.

    Word games like cross­word puz­zles and SCRABBLE® exer­cise your lex­i­cal recall (mem­o­ry for words that name things), atten­tion, mem­o­ry, and pat­tern recog­ni­tion. They can help main­tain your vocab­u­lary and avoid the frus­trat­ing tip-of-the-tongue phe­nom­e­non that all of us expe­ri­ence from time to time. Sudoko is not a math­e­mat­ics game in that you don’t actu­al­ly manip­u­late the num­bers as math­e­mat­i­cal enti­ties, but it is a pat­tern recog­ni­tion game using sym­bols (num­bers). A very legit­i­mate rea­son to play casu­al games is that they can be social and fun — which is good for reduc­ing stress.

    The draw­backs to puz­zles and games is that they are hard to cal­i­brate to ensure increas­ing chal­lenge, and they gen­er­al­ly only exer­cise a lim­it­ed num­ber of brain functions.

    So by all means, do puz­zles if you enjoy them! But be sure to push your­self to keep find­ing hard­er ones that fall just short of frus­trat­ing you. Also, just as you cross train your vol­un­tary mus­cles, be sure to cross train your men­tal mus­cles by bal­anc­ing your work­out with oth­er types of men­tal work (motor coor­di­na­tion, audi­to­ry, work­ing mem­o­ry, plan­ning, etc.). The com­put­er­ized pro­grams make it eas­i­er for you in the sense that they are indi­vid­u­al­ly cal­i­brat­ed for you to employ nov­el­ty, vari­ety, chal­lenge, and prac­tice to exer­cise your brain more thor­ough­ly in each session.

    Fur­ther read­ing on lan­guage pro­duc­tion, com­pre­hen­sion, and goofs: