"Without remembering how the past unfolded, trying to plan ahead is "like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair."
Author: Carl Zimmer, Discover, April 24, 2012 (April issue of the printed magazine).

The researchers "decided to study “fake” exercise instead, using two specialized drugs that had been tested several years ago by scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego. The drugs had been shown to induce the same kinds of changes in sedentary animals’ muscles that exercise would cause, so that even though the mice didn’t exercise, they physiologically responded as if they had. ... After a week of receiving either of the two drugs (and not exercising), the mice performed significantly better on tests of memory and learning than control animals that had simply remained quiet in their cages. ...The results, published in the journal Learning and Memory, showed that the drugged animals’ brains also contained far more new neurons in brain areas central to learning and memory than the brains of the control mice, an effect found by microscopic examination."
Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, May 9, 2012

Carlos Thomas - curated list of links to articles on neuroscience

Summary from Twitter: Dr. SunWolf @TheSocialBrain {The Neuroscience of Working Memory} Even when our attention drifts, our brain's working memory is still working
Author: Brian Alexander, Vitals on msnbc.com, April 23, 2012

Research from Kent Berridge, PhD.
Affective Neuroscience and the psychology of liking and wanting

"Is there something unique about certain brains, which allows some people to speak and understand so many more languages than the rest of us? The answer, experts say, seems to be yes, no and it's complicated."
Author: Emily Sohn, Discovery News, March 19, 2012

Infographic about the impact on your brain and body from a lack of sleep.

Infographic of the parts of the brain impacted by games

"... a new study shows that while creativity is largely a right-brained task, the left hemisphere of the brain plays a part, too.
Researchers from the University of Southern California published a study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience showing that the left brain is a crucial supporter of the right brain for creative tasks."
Author: Amanda L. Chan, The Huffington Post, March 7, 2012

"Videogames can change a person's brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better. A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability."

"People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second—four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind, said University of Rochester researchers."

One of the downsides: "Brain scans show that violent videogames can alter brain function in healthy young men after just a week of play, depressing activity among regions associated with emotional control, researchers at Indiana University recently reported."
Author: Robert Le Hotz, WSJ, March 6, 2012

Interview with Jonah Lehrer.
"... there are probably three neurologically distinct forms of creativity. One is when you have these moments of insight that come out of the blue--when you have epiphanies in the shower. Those seem to come from the part of the brain that's involved in things like the interpretation of metaphors and the processing of jokes. Another form is really working hard at solving a problem--it's not nearly as fun as having an epiphany, but it's just as important. The last form is spontaneous improvisation--what Miles Davis did."
Author: Rachel Z. Artdt, Fast Company Co.Design, Jan 27, 2012

About the book "The Emotional Life of Your Brain"

"People who experience a traumatic brain injury show a marked decline in the ability to make appropriate financial decisions in the immediate aftermath and a continued impairment on complex financial skills six months later, according to new research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham."
Author: University of Alabama (UAB) News, March 3, 2012

“Important cognitive skills, such as attentional control, may be closely related to the capacity to maintain rhythmic synchrony within a group, an ability that music trains in unique ways,”
Author: US News & World Report, Feb 24, 2012

Research showed that people remembered 90% of 2500 visual images 3 days after viewing each image once for only 2 second. This is the abstract.
Standing, Lionel;Conezio, Jerry;Haber, Ralph N.
Psychonomic Science, Vol 19(2), 1970, 73-74.
Author: APA PsycNet

Short videos that summarize the concepts in the book "Brain Rules" by John Medina. (The videos feature John Medina.)

Brain plasticity applies from cradle to grave. This is a book review of the 'Guitar Zero' book. by cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus. "Mr. Marcus discovers that "the evidence for critical periods is surprisingly weak." It is not that critical periods (when the brain is especially plastic) do not exist. They do, but they vary. The science shows that, at least for learning a language, we don't suddenly lose our plasticity and ability to learn at the end of the critical period. The falloff is often gradual. Relatedly, complex activities such as language and music involve many brain areas, not all affected equally. Studies of language development show that critical periods apply more to learning accent formation than to learning grammar. In music, a study shows that perfect pitch must be learned early; other skills, such as music theory, it appears, need not be."
"Immersion fosters learning after the critical period, not only because it enforces more practice time. Adults have more difficulty learning than children in part because they have built up so many language habits that they have to overcome. This too is a product of brain plasticity: The circuits we use the most get stronger and 'outcompete' others. Immersion prevents us from reinforcing those habits."
Author: Norman Doidge, WSJ, Feb 11, 2012

From an "interview Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, a distinguished professor of psychology, and a massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out."
1. Interleaving - focus on practicing different mini-skills, rather than trying to master one skill before moving on the next.
2. Vary your study location.
3. Spaced practice. Consider "taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become."
4. Forget about forgetting.
Author: Garth Sundem, Wired Magazine, Jan 29, 2012

"A Cochrane review (of 24 trials over 37 years that had 2,229 subjects), found that there was 'surprisingly little evidence' supporting the use of cognitive training programs for memory improvement compared to other activities for people age 60 or older, with or without mild cognitive impairment (MCI). ... Would you prefer to do or learn something that is truly meaningful to you (for example, learn a language) or engage in a training program designed without that consideration (as most are, especially the commercial ones)?"

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, keynote from the ITSE 2011 conference.

About a presentation by David Rock, the author of the book "Your Brain at Work."(1) Only 10% of employees do their best thinking in the work place. – What does this say about the way we design work?
(2) The more we need people to remember learning in the long term, the more we need to space the training out. – What does this mean for learning design?
(3) Our brains decide 5 times a second whether to engage or not. – What does an awareness of this do to help a leader or learning design?
(4) 40% of feedback interventions make things worse. Forced rankings: the noise and threat caused far outweigh the benefits. – Effective performance management and despite all the training and work to improve this only 60% is effective? Do forced ranking do more damage than good? (5) It is important to create work spaces with no distraction for creative and important work. – What does this mean for office design?
Author: Peter Casebow, Good Practice, undated [accessed June 18, 2011]

Judith Blair, CEO, Brains at Work
Nancy Maresh, Founder and Creative Director, Brains at Work
Date: Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Time: 10:00AM Pacific / 1:00PM Eastern
Free - but you have to register

"Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract"
Author: Scientific American, April 19, 2011

"Fast driving, drugs, and unsafe sex: The risk-loving behavior of adolescents may result from a neurological gap in the developing brain. ..."The trouble with teens, [Neuroscientist B. J.] Casey suspects, is that they fall into a neurological gap. The rush of hormones at puberty helps drive the reward-system network toward maturity, but those hormones do nothing to speed up the cognitive control network. Instead, cognitive control slowly matures through childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood. Until it catches up, teenagers are stuck with strong responses to rewards without much of a compensating response to the associated risks."
Author: Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine, March 24, 2011 (March 2011 issue)

Are athletes better at making split-second decisions in complex environs?
Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, March 23, 2011

"A common theme in brain research is that superior cognitive input to the executive function networks is more likely when stress is low and learning experiences are relevant to students. Lessons that are stimulating and challenging are more likely to pass through the reticular activating system (a filter in the lower brain that focuses attention on novel changes perceived in the environment). Classroom experiences that are free of intimidation may help information pass through the amygdala's affective filter. In addition, when classroom activities are pleasurable, the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholinem, which increases focused attention."
Author: Judy Willis (neurologist and classroom teacher), ASCD, Summer 2007

Author: Sara Bernard, edutopia.org, Dec 1, 2010

"To begin, there is no actual evidence to support the view that this generation is distracted, performing poorly or otherwise less capable than previous generations. ... By the time Net Generation kids reach their twenties, the typical Net Gener has spent over 20,000 hours on the Internet and over 10,000 hours playing video games of some kind. ... although total brain volume is largely unchanged after age 6, the brain continues to undergo significant structural remodeling throughout the adolescent years and into early adult life. The studies show that brain regions associated with attention, evaluation of rewards, emotional intelligence, impulse control, and goal-directed behavior all change significantly between age 12 and 24. ... Donald Leu, co-director of the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, has found that the skills needed for effective reading of books are different from those you need to read effectively online."
Author: Don Tapscott (author of the book "Growing Up Digital"), The Huffington Post, Nov 23, 2010

"Dr. Vartanian is on a quest some neuroscientists have come to see as quixotic: to map and understand the brain circuitry involved in creative thinking. Fifteen years of brain imaging studies have left researchers unable to define the regions and networks that are involved, although they have debunked the myth that creativity is seated in the right side of the brain and begun to explore the intriguing possibility that it is related to the ability to silence our inner critic. ... The research is challenging. It is hard to get people to be truly creative in a brain scanner ... He found that a part of the brain that plays a role in self-restraint and evaluation – the inner critic – powered down when the musicians were improvising, while an area associated with self-expression ramped up."
Author: Anne McIlroy, The Globe and Mail, Jan 28, 2011

Links to 20 TED talks about the brain including "Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain" and "Tom Wujec on 3 Ways the Brain Creates Meaning"
Author: Peter B. Reiner, Feb 3, 2011

Scientists have found indications that your ability to jump to intuitive answers — what they term the “Aha!” moment — may be affected by your mood. "... people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused ... doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape". Humor can move the brain into a similar state. "Dr. Beeman and Dr. Subramaniam had college students solve word-association puzzles after watching a short video of a stand-up routine by Robin Williams. The students solved more of the puzzles over all, and significantly more by sudden insight, compared with when they’d seen a scary or boring video beforehand." Keywords: openness, humor, jokes
Author: Benedict Carey, NY Times, Dec 6, 2010

embodied cognition
Author: Andy Clark, Dec 12, 2010

"... the teenage brain is like a Ferrari: It's sleek, shiny, sexy, and fast, and it corners really well. But it also has really crappy brakes. ...Researchers now believe that the prefrontal cortex -- responsible for things like organizing plans and ideas, forming strategies, and controlling impulses -- is not fully developed until the late 20s. ... "You're not imagining that teenagers often overreact to simple requests and misinterpret seemingly innocuous comments. Physiologically they may be less able than adults to accurately interpret facial expressions and the inflection in your voice." Shown a photo of angry woman, 100% "of adults guessed this woman's emotion correctly, but only 50% of teenagers got it right."
Author: Judith Newman, Parade.com, Nov 28, 2010

Remembering the future. "There is a growing conviction within neuroscience that one of the human mind's chief preoccupations is prediction. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing who is now afull-time neuroscientist, argued in his 2004 book "On Intelligence" that the mind does this by detecting a familiar pattern in its input, then anticipating from past experience what usually follows. The more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it. ... Daniel Schacter of Harvard University has made the remarkable discovery that the same parts of the mind hold both our episodic memories and our imagined futures. That is to say, if asked to imagine some specific future event, people activate the very same regions of the brain as they do when asked to recall some particular past event."
Author: Matt Ridley, WSJ.com, Dec 11, 2010

"A field of study called ‘embodied cognition‘ has found lots
of curious interactions between how the mind and brain manage our
responses depending on the possibilities for action. For example, we
perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand and
intend to use it, and wearing a heavy backpack causes hills to appear
steeper." How we respond to situations may depend on our position. When
dealing with anger "when the participants were angry and sitting up,
the left frontal lobe was much more active than the right – but when
angry and lying down, there was no difference."
Author: Tom Stafford, MindHacks.com, undated (probably Dec 12, 2010). Viewed Dec 12, 2010

"Motherhood may actually cause the brain to grow, not turn it
into mush, as some have claimed. Exploratory research published by the
American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers
bulked up in areas linked to motivation and behavior, and that mothers
who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in
key parts of the mid-brain." Lead researcher was neuroscientist
Pilyoung Kim, PhD, now with the National Institute of Mental Health.
Author: ScienceDaily.com, Oct. 20, 2010

"People who excel at a particular activity don’t necessarily
excel at teaching or explaining that activity to others. ... That’s
because motor skills are learned in one part of the brain and classroom
instruction and information read in a book are acquired in another area
... These areas without explicit reasoning are grasped in a lower part
of the brain, the basal ganglia. “It is similar to the fact that you
can’t explain what your fingers are doing when you are playing the
piano.” However, once a behavior becomes automatic, it becomes
cortical. “Automatic behaviors are stored in similar ways, in the
frontal cortex, regardless which system of the brain learned it first,”
Author: Futurity.org, Oct 21, 2010

"New research suggests that walking at least six miles per
week may protect brain size and in turn, preserve memory in old age,
according to a study published in the October 13, 2010, online issue of
Neurology ... For the study, 299 dementia-free people recorded how much
they walked in one week. Nine years later, people who walked 6-9 miles
per week had "greater gray matter volume than people who didn't walk as
much." After another 4 years, "The researchers found that those who
walked the most cut their risk of developing memory problems in half.
" Study author was Kirk I. Erickson, University of Pittsburgh.
Author: ScienceDaily.com, Oct 14, 2010

“Taking practice tests – particularly ones that involve
attempting to recall something from memory – can drastically increase
the likelihood that you’ll be able to remember that information again
later,” Dr. Katherine Rawson said. “Given that hundreds of experiments
have been conducted to establish the effects of testing on learning,
it’s surprising that we know very little about why testing improves
memory." In the article titled “Why Testing Improves Memory: Mediator
Effectiveness Hypothesis,” Rawson and Pyc reported an experiment
indicating that at least one reason why testing is good for memory is
that testing supports the use of more effective encoding strategies."
Author: Dept. of Psychology News, Kent State University, Oct 14, 2010

"Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the
brain in learning. During one study ... The kids were shown letters
before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In
children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was
far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked
at letters. 'It seems there is something really important about
manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all
the time,' says Karin Harman James" at Indiana University who led the
study. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the
University of Washington, "demonstrated that in grades two, four and
six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when
writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard."
Author: Gwendolyn Bounds, WSJ.com, October 5, 2010

The largest trial to date of 'brain-training' computer games
found there were no transfer effects to general cognition. In the BBC
study 11,430 volunteers (ages 18-60) completed a series of online tasks
for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, 3 times a week, for 6 weeks. In one
group, the tasks focused on reasoning, planning and problem-solving. A
second group focused on functions targeted by commercial brain-training
programs: short-term memory, attention, visuospatial abilities and
math. A third group used the Internet to find answers to obscure
questions. “There were absolutely no transfer effects from the training
tasks to more general tests of cognition”, says Adrian Owen, a
neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and
Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who led the study. However, Peter
Snyder, a neurologist who studies ageing at Brown University said “I
really worry about this study—I think it's flawed”. Author: Alla
Katsnelson, Nature News, April 20, 2010