Brilliant Blog

Psychologist Robert Emmons recently told us about the many benefits of practicing gratitude.

- "First, the practice of gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%. Second, this is not hard to achieve - a few hours spent writing a gratitude journal over 3 weeks can create an effect that lasts 6 months if not more. Third, that cultivating gratitude brings other health effects, such as longer and better quality sleep time."

Thanksgiving flew by for me this year without my taking the time to express gratitude to many of the people who have been so generous with their time and advice.

Given that this is a blog, I would like to say Thank You! to the following bloggers

*Zack at Brain Waves for suggesting launching a blog to share thoughts and impressions on our growing field.

*Brett at TraderFeed for his amazing insight and inspiration to do one's best.

*Senia at Senia.com Positive Psychology Coaching for her constant support, whenever needed, and many times unexpected, yet always welcome.

*Mo at Neurophilosophy for submitting some of our posts to blog carnivals before we even knew what these were...

*Bora at for A Blog Around The Clock for his amazing energy and open mind.

*ilker at The Thinking Blog for helping us learn how to navigate social bookmarking sites.

*Inaki at Sarelinks (in Spanish) for helping me deal with many technical/ platform decisions.

 

How you can show gratitude to other bloggers who have been helpful to you:

1. Simply tag 7 other bloggers, writing a Thank You post like this one. The more specific you are on why you appreciate their support, the more they will enjoy reading about it.
2. You then email them to say they have been tagged.

If you are not a blogger, simply think of 7 people who have been nice to you, and call them to say Thank You during the upcoming holidays.

Enjoy this belated burst of "Thanksgiving"!

Credit for pic: jeffclow via flickr

Very interesting collection of recent news...let's connect some dots

1) Great article titled Boom time for retirees (Financial Times)

- "By 2015, boomers will have a net worth of some $26,000bn (£12,750bn, €17,670bn) – equivalent to a year’s gross domestic product for the US and eurozone combined. They will control a larger proportion of wealth, income and consumption than any other generation in the country – the first time that consumers over 50 have held such sway over the world’s largest economy."

- "But as the boomers aged – by 2015 they will all be outside the fabled under-49 cohort – corporate America failed to grow old with them. Marketing experts argue that the continued focus of large companies such as P&G and Gap on the youth of “generation X” and “generation Y” overlooks a simple statistic: the 18-49 age group will grow by only 1m people in the next 10 years, compared with the 22.5m Americans set to enter the 50-plus bracket."

- “The last thing the [boomer] generation needs is a company that tells them they need tools to address their lack of dexterity,” he says. “They don’t want geriatric tools, they want cool stuff.”

Main take-way: baby boomers are always "awake" and reinventing things...companies, advertisers, time to wake-up! 

Full article: Boom time for retirees

2) The article is based upon this excellent McKinsey report: Serving Aging Baby Boomers (subscription required)

2) The article is based upon this excellent McKinsey report:  (subscription required)

- The research provides a call to action for companies to understand and properly serve the aging boomers as new customers, determine what role boomers can play in their organization, shift products and services to address the rise and fall of boomer spending, and invest now to develop new products and services to address aging boomers’ needs, especially the unprepared segment.

3) Some bad news on cognitive health and aging, based on a study just published: Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age (Scientific American)

"But what is it that actually causes memory and other cognitive abilities to go soft with senescence? Previous research has shown that bundles of axons (tubular projections sent out by neurons to signal other nerve cells) wither over time. These conduits, collectively referred to as white matter, help connect different regions of the brain to allow for proper information processing."

"They fingered the potential reason for the dip by doing further brain scans using diffusion tensor imaging, an MRI technique that gauges how well white matter is functioning by monitoring water movement along the axonal bundles. If communication is strong, water flows as if cascading down a celery stalk, says Randy Buckner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard; if it is disrupted, the pattern looks more like a drop of dye in a water bucket that has scattered in all directions. The latter was more evident in the older group, an indication that their white matter had lost some of its integrity."

Main take-away: what's is new is that the study showed how a main factor in cognitive decline is the weakening of the main "bridges" between different parts of the brain. Which is why specialized, local abilities such as vocabulary may improve over time, while higher-order ones, such as planning or reasoning, that require the integration of multiple brain areas and functions, decline.

Full article: Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age

4) And some good news: Older Adults with Mild Memory Impairment Still Benefit from Cognitive Training in Areas not Reliant on Memorization

- "Older adults with pre-existing mild memory impairment benefit as much as those with normal memory function from certain forms of cognitive training that don’t rely on memorization, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society. These findings could indicate the ability for older adults to maintain skills that allow them to carry out daily tasks and lead a higher quality of life."

- "In the study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), older adults who were otherwise healthy and living independently received training focused on targeted cognitive skills. A small number of participants in the study were found to have a decline in their ability to form new memories of experiences or facts, an ability called declarative memory. These individuals were unable to improve their memorization skills, but were able to improve their reasoning skills and become faster at processing visual information."

5) One important implication that neither the article nor the report above cover enough is how all this will impact Corporate Hiring and Training practices to help boomers stay healthy and productive as long as possible. You can read more about our thoughts at Training the Aging Workforce and also enjoy this concept map on Cognitive Fitness and The Future of Work

Guess which demographic group will reinvent lifelong cognitive fitness and health habits?

Credit for pic: National Geographic

A misconception we encounter often is that "memory" is the only, or most important, "thing" that our brains do. And the only one we need to care for.

We have a variety of cognitive abilities, from attention to processing speed to problem-solving to emotional self-regulation to, yes, memory. (And more). Even memory is not one whole thing, but has different types and processes: working memory vs. long-term, auditory vs. visual, events vs. facts vs. skills.

I say this in the context of this article and video you may already have seen, where a young chimp displays amazing visual working memory capability, beating humans

- Read insightful blog post here. Quote

"This study shows that chimps can memorize at a glance the numerals presented on the screen, and that they can do so just as well - and even better - than humans can. Note that the superior performance came from a young chimp, and that the performance of older chimps on the same task was more similar to that of humans."

- Watch video

Impressive, isn't yet? Yet, a clear indication that memory is not all that matters. Please compare the "intelligence" (in any way you want to define it), the quality of thinking, displayed by those apes, with the one displayed in this recent interview with Bill Drayton at Good Magazine, founder of Ashoka and one of the parents of the social entrepreneurship movement. Quotes:

- "Ashoka (and all of us in the GOOD community) are serving the most profound historical transformation in the structure of society since the agricultural revolution--the shift from a world led by small elites to an “everyone a change-maker” global society."

- "Social entrepreneurship is the field Ashoka has been building for 27 years that helps the world’s most promising new ideas and the social entrepreneurs behind them get started, succeed over their long life cycles, work and collaborate together through the local to global community we are building."

Full interview: here (via Huffington Post)

You can read more about Ashoka at "Everyone a Changemaker", Ashoka and Google

Some important cognitive abilities are what neuropsychologists call Executive Functions, which reside in our frontal lobes (behind your forehead), the most recent part of our brains in evolutionary terms. Some examples:

- Planning: foresight in devising multi-step strategies.

- Flexibility: capacity for quickly switching to the appropriate mental mode.

- Inhibition: the ability to withstand distraction, and internal urges.

- Anticipation: prediction based on pattern recognition.

- Critical evaluation: logical analysis.

- Working memory: capacity to hold and manipulate information "on-line" in our minds in real time.

- Fuzzy logic: capacity to choose with incomplete information.

- Divided attention: ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.

- Decision-making: both quality and speed.

A highly recommended book, if you are interested in learning more about Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes, is The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind , by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg. You can read an in-depth review here.

On a related note, you may enjoy this Time Magazine special on What Makes Us Moral.

Here you have a few recent great blog carnivals (collections of selected blog posts focused on specific topics):

- Grand Rounds: health and medicine

- Encephalon: neuroscience and psychology

- COTC: business and entrepreneurship

- Human Resources: articles for HR professionals

- Books: good book reviews

We also just found a great overview of the brain fitness market in French, summarizing many of the topics we have written about:

Des logiciels qui boostent le cerveau… et son marché

Memory in the Real World

• Edited by Gillian Cohen, Martin A. Conway

This textbook has been updated and extended to include recent research in all areas of everyday memory. The controversy about the value of naturalistic research, as opposed to traditional laboratory methods, is outlined, and the views of both critics and defenders are put forward. The trend toward convergence of the two approaches is evaluated.

This book brings together studies on many different topics such as memory for plans and actions, for names and faces, for routes and maps, conversations and stories, autobiographical experiences, and childhood events. Further chapters focus on memory for general knowledge and for specialist domains such as music, chess, and computer programming. Emphasis is also given to memory for internal mental events such as thoughts and dreams. False memory syndrome, memory for health events, and social remembering are covered.

This new edition spells out the links between naturalistic and applied studies and the models, and theories that support them. It shows how theoretical frameworks such as schemas, scripts, mental models and production systems, and concepts such as encoding specificity, implicit memory and rule-based and case-based reasoning are needed to explain and interpret the findings and observations derived from the study of memory in the real world.

ISBN: 9781841696409

Published December 13 2007 by Psychology Press.

The Psychology of Language

From Data to Theory

• By Trevor A. Harley

The Psychology of Language, 3^rd Edition is a thorough revision and update of the popular second edition. It contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language including how we acquire, understand, produce, and store language. The new edition contains new chapters on how children learn to read, and how language is used in everyday settings. It also describes recent research on the impact of new techniques of brain imaging.

The text is comprehensive and written in a lively and accessible style. It covers all the main topics in this complex field, focusing on reading, writing, speaking, and listening in both adult and child language. There is an emphasis on language processing as well as language production and coverage of the social basis of language. The text includes recent connectionist models of language, describing complex ideas in a clear and approachable manner. Following a strong developmental theme, the text describes how children acquire language (sometimes more than one), and also how they learn to read. The Psychology of Language also demonstrates how language is related to the brain and to other aspects of cognition.

For the first time a CD-ROM of supplementary materials will be available to accompany the textbook, which will include:

Chapter-by-chapter lecture slides

An interactive chapter-by-chapter multiple-choice question test bank

Multiple-choice questions in paper and pen format.

The Psychology of Language assumes no prior knowledge other than a grounding in the basic concepts of cognitive psychology. This third edition of this best-selling textbook will be essential reading for any student of cognition, psycholinguistics or the psychology of language. It will also be useful for those on speech and language therapy courses.

ISBN: 9781841693811

Published December 03 2007 by Psychology Press.

PBS has announced a special program on neuroplasticity and brain fitness titled "Brain Fitness Program" during the month of December. You can check local times and listings:

"This program presents a workout to help viewers get their brains in better shape. The Brain Fitness Program is based on neuro-plasticity, the ability of the brain to change and adapt — even rewire itself. In the past two years, a team of scientists has developed computer-based stimulus sets that drive beneficial chemical, physical and functional changes in the brain. Dr. Michael Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco and his colleagues around the world have been leading this effort; he brings the research findings, along with a scientifically based set of brain exercises, to PBS viewers in this innovative and life-altering program. Peter Coyote (pictured) narrates. "

Watch the 3-minute trailer: click here.

Related blog posts

- Brain Fitness: November Monthly Digest: a collection of articles and links including news, resources, brain teasers, and more.

- Neuroplasticity 101 and Brain Fitness Glossary: an overview of the emerging science and some key concepts to understand it.

- Brain Training Games and "Games": a 10-Question Checklist on how to evaluate programs that make brain-related claims.

- Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology Interview Series: in-depth interviews with 11 scientists and experts in cognitive training and brain fitness.

- Books on neuroplasticity and memory training: reviews of Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind, by Sharon Begley, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. Both books are fascinating and powerful; each would have merited appearing in the 2007 New York Times List of 100 Notable Books.

Credit for pic: Christopher Gallo