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The wedding day is considered to be the happiest day of many people’s lives.  It also ranks as one of the most stressful.  Invitations.  Flowers.  Catering.  Dresses and tuxedoes. The reception. Putting on a big show - bigger than the Oscars, bigger than the Super Bowl. But ultimately, according to Dr. Dan Clement, associate professor of psychology [...]

Is depression a survival tool? Some new treatments assume so.  This new field within psychology is taking root and spreading its influence.  In the Fall of 2005, psychiatrist J. Andersen Thomson Jr. was treating an 18-year-old college freshman whom he describes as “intensely depressed, feeling suicidal and doing self-cutting.” A few years before, Thomson says, he would [...]

Question 15 of 25 from Brain Fitness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Questions. I don’t want to ever retire. What can I do to remain sharp? Provide your brain with regular mental stimulation that is novel and challenging.Maintain your social network for both stimulation and stress reduction.Work out, eat well, stimulate your brain, and reduce chronic stress.Any good brain fitness program must provide you a variety of new challenges over time. Stress reduction is another major concern. Maintaining your exercise routine and social networks will help a lot in this regard. Make social appointments to go for a walk with a friend or family member.

While culling essays for her new collection, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” Joan Acocella discovered a loose theme: the hardships that come with creation and how various artists dealt with these obstacles — or did not. The humbler virtues of perseverance, she came to see, are as important, and as laudable, as talent. As she writes [...]

Continuing with the theme of a Week of Science sponsored by Just Science, we will highlight some of the key points in: Appelhans BM, Luecken LJ. Heart Rate Variability as an Index of Regulated Emotional Responding. Review of General Psychology. 2006;10:229–240. Effective emotional regulation depends on being able to flexibly adjust your physiological response to a changing environment moment by moment.Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the continuous interplay between sympathetic and parasympathetic influences on heart rate that yields information about autonomic flexibility and thereby represents the capacity for regulated emotional responding.

A Tulare County, California, murder case could affect several dozen more around the state where suspects’ exposure to the death penalty depends on their level of mental retardation.State Supreme Court justices now have three months to ponder whether a Delano man’s mental retardation is severe enough to spare him from possible execution and whether prosecutors [...]

If you want to help your kids do better in school, it turns out the best thing might be a little positive thinking. Recently, investigators set out to learn if kids’ beliefs about their intelligence had any effect on their school performance. In one study, they followed 12-year-olds through two years of school.  All of the kids [...]

Charles Murray would rather you didn’t go to college. It probably won’t prepare you for any occupation, and, odds are, you’re not smart enough to benefit from a college education anyway. You shouldn’t feel bad – you were born this way. And those lucky few who form the cognitive elite? Well, their “spread of wealth [...]

Drumming increases heart rate and blood flow just like an aerobic exercise. The process of drumming engages both the linear, (rational left brain) and the creative, (intuitive right brain).  It slows the brain waves to around 8 cycles per second, the exact frequency of the earth.   Improved IQ scores can now officially be added to the [...]

"Great fun. Instructor is delightful, informative, enthusiastic. If this is a gym for the brain-who thought it could be so fun?" - Anonymous evaluation from student Exercise Your Brain: New Brain Research and Implications DVD: $19.99 All sales final. Approximate running time 80 minutes. Color / Not Rated / NTSC / Zone 0. This one-hour and 20 minute class [...]

Professor Bradley Gibson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Notre Dame, and Director of the Perception and Attention Lab there. He is a cognitive psychologist with research interests in perception, attention, and visual cognition. Gibson's research has been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Experimental Psychology, [...]

Today we will continue our review of the benefits of brain training for specific occupations: in this case, pilots and basketball players. The lessons can be relevant not only for corporate training but also for education and brain health & wellness. To do so, we will select quotes from our interview last year with one of [...]

The organizers of this amazing conference, whose registration is about to expire, just extended their very kind offer to SharpBrains readers: you can register at the reduced price of $475 (right now the normal price is $545) if you do so by February 9nd. You can register here http://www.edupr.com/reg.html, making sure to write SharpBrains1 in the [...]

A new US study suggests there is a strong link between loneliness and Alzheimer’s in old age. The study is published in this month’s issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. Risk of developing Alzheimer’s in old age has been linked to social isolation before, but not with perceived isolation, or loneliness. Social isolation is a measure of [...]

Queen’s University will welcome more than 1,000 second and third level students from across Ireland later this week to a series of world-class psychology lectures. The event, which begins on Friday, is only the second ever All-Ireland undergraduate Careers Fair designed specifically for those interested in the field of Psychology. Taking place in the Whitla Hall at [...]

Reminder: 60 or so science bloggers are celebrating the Week of Science presented at Just Science, from Monday, February 5, through Sunday, February 11. We will be writing about "just science" this week, by discussing peer-reviewed research papers in the field of brain fitness. Yesterday we talked about Cognitive Reserve and Lifestyle, a paper and research [...]

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In honor of the Week of Science presented at Just Science we will be writing about "just science".Today, we will highlight the key points in an excellent review of cognitive reserve: Today, we will highlight the key points in an excellent review of cognitive reserve: Scarmeas, Nikolaos and Stern, Yaakov. Cognitive reserve and lifestyle. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. 2003;25:625-33.The concept of cognitive reserve has been defined as the ability of an individual to tolerate progressive brain pathology without demonstrating clinical cognitive symptoms. Epidemiological evidence suggests that individuals with higher IQ, education, occupational achievement, or participation in intellectually and socially active lifestyles may result in both quantitatively more cognitive networks and qualitatively more functionally efficient networks resulting in more reserve.

Central Elementary School had early dismissal on March 16, 2004, and as parents waited in the cafeteria for their children, one father saw that his 6-year-old son, walking in line with his class, appeared deeply disturbed. “My son had this look on his face,” said the father, “and when he came to me, I bent down [...]