Month: August 2008

Brain Tools: Resources for Enhancing Cognitive Performance

There are a raft of products and courses available to the general public who want to improve their cognitive performance. While there are simple methods, like stimulating your brain with cross-word puzzles and brain teasers, there are also more sophisticated techniques often developed by companies or individuals who have made their products available to the public. The links below are some of the products I have found in my online browsing, if you find any in your e-travels, you might like to suggest a few links too. I am not endorsing any of the products but am interested, not necessarily by the products, but by how the products fit into the market they cater for. Many scientists are sceptical, I am curious. Often what works for one person, may not necessarily work for another. This is true not only of placebos, but sometimes of proven therapies and medication.

 

One line of products I certainly would invest in myself (if I had the time and money) would be what could be called “Cognitive Gym” products. Just like any other organ, your brain needs to be exercised regularly to work efficiently. Therapists and clinicians are continually producing new tools to enhance cognitive performance. These tools can be simple memory games, or programs to retrain patterns of thinking. Often “Cognitive Gym” products can be fun and educational. For the moment, with little time to research the resources available (and little money to spend on them), I will stick to playing the piano and listening to my “Learn Portuguese” CDs.

 

Neurofeedback is another type of ‘brain enhancement tool’. It is a non-invasive technique that can be used to enhance normal cognitive performance or to accompany the treatment of neuropsychological and psychiatric disorders such as epilepsy and ADHD.

 

Brain Stimulation can often attract an audience because of the “crazy scientist” appeal (At least to my mind). Techniques, such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, are constantly being developed and have been used to enhance creativity, concentration and attention. Some scientists are iffy about these tools, other people swear by them.

 

LINKS:

COGNITIVE GYM

Challenging Our Minds                             

Brain Gym Exercises for Executives                     

Cognitive Fitness                                        

Brain Bytes Training Programs                  

 

NEURO-FEEDBACK

Dr Diane                                                       

Scientific American Mind                            

Dr Daniel Amen                                           

EEG Spectrum International                                   

 

BRAIN STIMULATION

imusic for the brain                                     

Transparent Corporation                           

 

I’m sure there’s more out there that I have yet to find!

 

 

 

Got Questions? Find Answers at Encephalon 52

Ouroboros is hosting Encephalon this time around. This edition provides plenty of answers to those questions we’ve always had, such as the relationships between depression and neurogenesis, the molecular basis of bipolar disorder, and particularly important for me, the perceptual basis of tone deafness (I now have an explanation for my wife…). Plus lots of good stuff from the usual suspects.

It’s a comprehensive edition, so check it out. One I really liked was a review of “grandmother neurons,” or the idea that a single neuron encodes a single concept. Over at Neurotic Physiology, we have “context, personality, and brain imaging,” examining recent research on attachment styles, social cues, and differing underlying neural correlates. Finally, the Neurocritic gives us a gender perspective on Olympics coverage, boiling down to fewer clothes = more coverage. So there’s some neuroscience, some interactions, and some anthropology for you!

100,000!

Last night we hit 100,000 on-site vists. Greg and I want to thank everyone who has come to our blog. It’s been a great ride over the past months, something we’ve both enjoyed. We never imagined that the site would grow so quickly.

Thank you as well to everyone out there who has stumbled or linked or commented or otherwise enriched what we do here. And thanks also to the people who read the blog through the feed. While you don’t go into the official stats, we know there are a lot of you!

Finally, if any of you are interested in what the top 10 have been since last December, here they are:

Cultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Thinking on Meaning and Risk

Poverty Poisons the Brain

Girls Gone Guilty: Evolutionary Psych on Sex #2

Brain Doping Poll Results In

Brain vs. Philosophy: Howard Gardner Get Us Across!

Synesthesia and Methaphor – I’m Not Feeling It

Psychopharma-parenting

Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

Anthropology and Neuroscience Podcasts

Drugs Round Up

Brain

Science Daily, Cocaine Addiction Linked To Voluntary Drug Use And Cellular Memory, Study Shows
Voluntary use, memory, and predisposition to use again—active choice matters, and from there, a short jump to meaning (why choose drugs…)

Alexis Madrigal, Memory Disruption Could Aid Addicts
Blocking associative memory in rats works. Are people next?

Hal Arkowitz and Scott Lilienfeld, Do-It-Yourself Addiction Cures?
Self-change happens, and it can work

Reuters, Feeling Poor Spurs Lottery Ticket Purchases
Research confirms what the lottery business already knows—feeling subjectively poor makes it more likely to buy that ticket to a quick-fix dream

Pure Pedantry, Ricardo Ricco & Epo Abuse and Heptaminol? Where Do They Even Find This Stuff
The scientific low-down on performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France

Jane Brody, Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions
Coffee and your health—sorting out the myths and the realities

Henry Fountain, It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest
Alcohol-swigging small mammals like their fermented fruit

Mark Kern, The Seductiveness of Bad Habits
Health and unhealthy habits and addiction

Continue reading “Drugs Round Up”

Cultural Neuroscience

Shihui Han and Georg Northoff have just published Culture-Sensitive Neural Substrates of Human Cognition: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach. This article will prove foundational for “cultural neuroscience,” a term Han & Northoff use near the end of the article. I highly recommend that everyone read the full version (pdf), but will outline and comment on it here.

In this Perspectives piece in Nature Neuroscience Reviews, Han and Northoff review the evidence on how culture influences neural mechanisms, highlight the need to integrate social neuroscience and cultural cognition research, argue for transcultural neuroimaging as an effective method for cultural neuroscience, and lay out implications for the future of this emerging field.

But if you don’t take my word for it, here’s their abstract:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

Cultural Effects on Cognition

Han and Northoff systematically cover research on “cultural effects on cognition,” including perceptual processing, attentional modulation, language and music, and number representation and mental calculation. Their Figure 1, presented below, summarizes research on culture and attention, highlighting context-dependent differences in attention between Americans and East Asians.

Continue reading “Cultural Neuroscience”

New Four Stone Hearth

So the new Four Stone Hearth, the blog carnival of anthropology, is up at Almost Diamonds. Stephanie may not be an anthropologist, but she puts together a formidable list, including several Olympic-related posts, such as Rex’s (he’s still Alex to me) contribution at Savage Minds, Well I guess we should say something about the Olympics and a fascinating short post by Vaughn at Mind Hacks on cross-cultural studies of the immediate reaction to winning and losing among sighted and blind athletes. There’s a number of good archaeological posts (including Stone Pages pointing to a story about Australia’s less-than-enthusiastic attempts to preserve archaeological sites), a cluster on Neandertal research, and a fascinating piece on artificial language evolution in the laboratory from Anthropology.net (with actual people instead of computers doing the learning).

Lots of good stuff — so why are you still here and not reading it?!