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Willpower

How does mindfulness improve self-control and executive functioning?

March 24, 2014 by Greater Good Science Center

MeditationWe have emo­tions for a rea­son. Anger in response to injus­tice can sig­nal that the sit­u­a­tion needs to change; sad­ness in response to loss can sig­nal that we’d like to keep the peo­ple we love in our lives.

It’s when we rumi­nate, or get caught up in our emo­tions, that they might become mal­adap­tive. That’s when [Read more…] about How does mind­ful­ness improve self-con­trol and exec­u­tive functioning?

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Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning, Peak Performance Tagged With: emotion regulation, executive-control, mindfulness, Willpower

Transcript: David DiSalvo on How Cultural Evolution Outpaces Natural Evolution and Old Brain Metaphors

December 9, 2011 by SharpBrains

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion today with David DiS­al­vo, author of What makes your brain hap­py and why you should do the oppo­site, mod­er­at­ed by Alvaro Fer­nan­dez. You vis­it pre­vi­ous Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Full Tran­script (Light­ly edit­ed) of Live Q&A held on Decem­ber 9th, 2–3pm ET

[Read more…] about Tran­script: David DiS­al­vo on How Cul­tur­al Evo­lu­tion Out­paces Nat­ur­al Evo­lu­tion and Old Brain Metaphors

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Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: adaptation, Advanced-Brain-Technologies, Baumeister, behavior, book, brain, conscious, default mode, evolution, improvement, information, Internet, Kahneman, metaphor, multi-task, multitasking, neural network, neuroplasticity, Peter Singer, Posit-Science, psychosocial, Ray Kurzweil, subconscious, Tierney, wedge, Willpower, Working-memory

Brain Development Through Bilingual Education and Activities Requiring Self-Control

September 18, 2011 by SharpBrains

How To Help Your Child’s Brain Grow Up Strong (NPR):

- “Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned,” says Aamodt. “They’re less like­ly to have dif­fi­cul­ty choos­ing between con­flict­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties when there are two pos­si­ble respons­es that both present them­selves. They’re also bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out what oth­er peo­ple are think­ing, which is prob­a­bly because they have to fig­ure out which lan­guage to use every time they talk to [Read more…] about Brain Devel­op­ment Through Bilin­gual Edu­ca­tion and Activ­i­ties Requir­ing Self-Control

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Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: Aamodt, academic-success, brain, brain-development, childre, IQ, martial-arts, math, predictor, reading, restrain impulses, self-control, tea party, Willpower

Who Says This is The Classroom of the Future?

September 6, 2011 by Alvaro Fernandez

The New York Times has recent­ly pub­lished sev­er­al very good and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed articles…let’s try and con­nect some dots. What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­o­gy in lit­er­al­ly mind­less ways? What if the Edu­ca­tion of the Future (some­times also referred to as “21st Cen­tu­ry Skills”) was­n’t so much about the How we edu­cate but about the What we want stu­dents to learn and devel­op, apply­ing what we know about mind and brain to the needs they are like­ly to face dur­ing the next 50–70 years of their lives? [Read more…] about Who Says This is The Class­room of the Future?

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Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: 21st Century Skills, academic-performance., Arthur-Lavin, brain, Child-Development, classroom, Education & Lifelong Learning, emotional-self-regulation, focus, future, Internet, life skills, Michael-Posner, mind, motivation, resilience, self-control, self-regulation, Steve Pinker, technology, test-scores, training attention, Willpower, Working-memory, working-memory-training

Update: Public Libraries as Health Clubs for the Brain

July 7, 2009 by Alvaro Fernandez

Here you have the July edi­tion of our month­ly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and Brain Fitnessbrain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, using the box at the top of this page.

Pub­lic libraries have long offered the pub­lic more than books. And now, recent demo­graph­ic and sci­en­tif­ic trends are con­verg­ing to fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­form the role of libraries in our cul­ture. You may enjoy read­ing this recent arti­cle I wrote for the May-June 2009 Issue of Aging Today, the bimonth­ly pub­li­ca­tion of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging: Pub­lic Libraries: Com­mu­ni­ty-Based Health Clubs for the Brain.

The Big Picture

Can You Out­smart Your Genes? An Inter­view with Author Richard Nis­bett: David DiS­al­vo inter­views Richard Nis­bett, the author of Intel­li­gence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cul­tures Count, who has emerged as a per­sua­sive voice mar­shalling evi­dence to dis­prove the hered­i­ty-is-des­tiny argument.

Yes, You Can Build Willpow­er: Daniel Gole­man dis­cuss­es how the brain makes about 10,000 new cells every day, how they migrate to where they are need­ed, and how each cell can make around 10,000 con­nec­tions to oth­er brain cells. Impli­ca­tion? Med­i­tate, mind­ful­ly, and build pos­i­tive habits.

Bird’s Eye View of Cog­ni­tive Health Inno­va­tion: Alvaro Fer­nan­dez opened the Cog­ni­tive Health Track dur­ing the Games for Health Con­fer­ence (June 11–12th, Boston) with an overview of the seri­ous games, soft­ware and online appli­ca­tions that can help assess and train cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able Here.

Brain Tests and Myths

The Best Mem­o­ry Tests, from the Alzheimer’s Action Plan: Dr. Murali Doraiswamy dis­cuss­es the Pros and Cons of the most com­mon assess­ments to iden­ti­fy cog­ni­tive prob­lems, includ­ing what the Mini-Men­tal State Exam (MMSE) does and doesn´t, and inno­v­a­tive com­put­er­ized neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal tests.

Debunk­ing 10 Brain Health Myths: Does your brain have a “Brain Age”? Is a Mag­ic Pill to “pre­vent mem­o­ry prob­lems” right around the cor­ner? Does “aging” equal “decline”? Check out the facts to debunk 10 com­mon myths on brain health.

Resources

Free Webi­nar: On July 21st, 10am Pacif­ic Time/ 1pm East­ern Time, Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, co-authors of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, will cov­er the main high­lights from this new book and address the ques­tions sub­mit­ted by read­ers. You can learn more and reg­is­ter HERE.

Research Ref­er­ences:  This is a par­tial list of the sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies reviewed dur­ing the research phase of Sharp­Brain­s’s new book, orga­nized by rel­e­vant chap­ter, for those of you who like to explore top­ics in depth by read­ing orig­i­nal research (per­haps PubMed should pro­mote itself as a nev­er end­ing source of men­tal stimulation?).

Brain Teasers

Brain Teasers on Brain Fit­ness: Are you ready to test your knowl­edge of sev­er­al key brain fit­ness met­rics? For exam­ple: How many sol­diers in the US Army have gone through com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive test­ing before being deployed, and why?
Final­ly, a request: if you have already read The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, and could write a brief cus­tomer review at Amazon.com, we would sure­ly appre­ci­ate! The Amazon.com book page is Here.

Best regards, and enjoy the month

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, SharpBrains Monthly eNewsletter, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: aging, Alzheimers, American-Society-on-Aging, Books, brain, brain-books, brain-teaser, cognitive, cognitive-abilities, cognitive-health, Daniel-Goleman, David-DiSalvo, Games-for-Health, genes, health-clubs, intelligence, libraries, memory-tests, Mind-Games, Mini-Mental-State-Exam, MMSE, Murali-Doraiswamy, neuropsychological, public-libraries, Richard-Nisbett, Serious-Games, Willpower

Daniel Goleman: Yes, You Can Build Willpower (meditate on neuroplasticity!)

July 5, 2009 by Greater Good Science Center

(Edi­tor’s note: Daniel Gole­man is now con­duct­ing a series of audio inter­views includ­ing a great one with Richard David­son on Train­ing the Brain. We are hon­ored to bring you this guest post by Daniel Gole­man, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine.)

—

Yes, You Can: 

New research sug­gests we can build our willpower

– By Daniel Goleman

Those of us who strug­gle to resist junk foods or oth­er­wise suf­fer a lack of willpow­er will be heart­ened by some good news from neu­ro­science. But there’s some bad news, too.

First, the bad news. A slew of stud­ies sug­gest that we each have a fixed neur­al reser­voir of willpow­er, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for oth­ers. Tasks that demand some self-con­trol make it hard­er for us to do the next thing that takes willpower.

In a typ­i­cal exper­i­ment on this effect, one group of peo­ple was made to watch a video of a bor­ing scene; anoth­er was not. Then both groups had to cir­cle every “e” in a long pas­sage of writ­ing. The result? The peo­ple who had to first sit through the bor­ing video gave up faster. The same loss of per­sis­tence has been found when peo­ple try to resist tempt­ing foods, sup­press emo­tion­al reac­tions, or even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all sug­gests we have a fixed willpow­er bud­get, one we should be care­ful in spend­ing. Some neu­ro­sci­en­tists sus­pect that self-con­trol con­sumes blood sug­ar, which takes a while to build up again; thus, the deple­tion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our willpow­er; like a mus­cle, the more we use it, the more it grad­u­al­ly increas­es over time. But doing this takes, of all things, willpower.

As the mus­cle of will grows, the larg­er our reser­voir of self-dis­ci­pline becomes. So peo­ple who are able to [Read more…] about Daniel Gole­man: Yes, You Can Build Willpow­er (med­i­tate on neuroplasticity!)

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: Affective-Neuroscience, brain, Brain-Training, build-willpower, Daniel-Goleman, London-Taxi-Drivers, meditation, mindfulness, Mindfulness-Training, neuroplasticity, neuroscience, prefrontal-cortex, Sam-Wang, Sandra-Aamodt, self-discipline, Training-the-Brain, Willpower

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