Toxic stress physically damages a child’s developing brain.
How a school principles learns from John Medina, author of "Brain Rules" and Natalie Turner. "Toxic stress comes from complex trauma ... [which] ain’t pretty. It’s when your dad’s in prison AND your mom’s a meth addict AND she’s too drugged out to move in the mornings, so you’ve got to take care of your little brother, get him fed and off to school, AND you’re despairing about being evicted for the third time because she hasn’t paid the rent and the landlord’s screaming at you to do something. ... Teens who live with complex trauma are walking post-traumatic stress time bombs ... They teeter through their days. The smallest incident can push them into a full-blown meltdown. Some kids run away. Some explode in rage. Some just mentally check out."

"There are just two simple rules, says Turner. Rule No. 1: Take nothing a raging kid says personally. Really. Act like a duck: let the words roll off your back like drops of water."

"Rule No. 2: Don’t mirror the kid’s behavior. Take a deep breath. Wait for the storm to pass, and then ask something along the lines of: 'Are you okay? Did something happen to you that’s bothering you? Do you want to talk about it?'”

"It’s not that a kid gets off the hook for bad behavior. 'There have to be consequences,' explains Turner. Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. 'We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.'"

Brain Science podcasts

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

"Neuroscientists have pinpointed the areas of the brain that help us to look on the bright side."
Author: Kerri Smith, Nature, 24 Oct 2007

Carlos Thomas - curated list of links to articles on neuroscience

In 2 studies using fMRI, more parts of the brain lit up.
"There have been many thousands of fMRI papers published since the technique was developed 20 years ago. The great majority of these have produced the familiar “blob” plots showing that different kinds of mental processes engage localized activity in particular parts of the brain. Thyreau and Gonzalez-Castillo, however, were able to detect effects too small to be noticed in such neuroimaging experiments, and found that rather than isolated blobs, large swathes of the brain were involved. This doesn’t mean that everywhere responded equally to the task: the signal was stronger in some areas of the brain than in others, but there were no clear-cut divisions between “active” and “inactive” areas."
Author: Discover Magazine, April 25, 2012

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

Summary on Twitter by Dr. SunWolf @TheSocialBrain
{The Neuroscience of Working Memory} Even when our attention drifts, our brain's working memory is still working.
This is heavy academic article

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

"A mouse that runs all the time is smarter than one that doesn’t. Probably true for people, too."
"For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does."
Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, April 18, 2012

"Most people would agree that a lot of our unhappiness comes from the mind’s annoying chatter, which includes obsessions, worries, drifts from this stress to that stress, and our compulsive and exhausting need to anticipate the future. Not surprisingly, the goal of most adults is to get the mind to shut up, calm down, and chill out. ... [One study] found that mind wandering is linked to activation of network of brain cells called the default mode network (DMN), which is active not when we’re doing high-level processing, but when we’re drifting about in “self-referential” thoughts (read: when our brain is flitting from one life-worry to the next)."
How to stop this self-chatter? Mediation works better than smoking or drinking.
Author: Alice G. Walton, Forbes, Sept 11, 2012

Curated list of articles about neuroscience
(Paper.li example)

Tina Seelig, author of "InGenius," talks with Fast Company about how most employees and bosses unknowingly stifle their creativity--and how Author: Drake Baer, Fast Company, April 18, 2012

inGenius: A Crash Course in Creativity. - About the book and the Stanford course by neuroscience professor Tina Seelig
Author: Mathew E. May

YouTube Video. "In this brief clip, [neuroscience professor] David Linden discusses how humans are hardwired to feel pleasure from uncertainty and uses the example of gambling as such a source. In roulette, Linden presupposes that if a digital image of the brain was taken while the ball is spinning, he says it would likely show the beginnings of a pleasure buzz. While most people think you would get a pleasure buzz when you win, according to Linden the source of pleasure is actually the moment of uncertainty while the ball is spinning."
Author: TrendHunter Keynotes, April 12, 2012

To see if student can maintain focus, observers watched "300 middle school, high school and university students studying something important for a mere 15 minutes in their natural environments....
The results were startling. First, these students were only able to focus and stay on task for an average of three minutes at a time and nearly all of their distractions came from technology. [By the way, other researchers have found similar attention spans with computer programmers and medical students.] The major culprit: their smartphone and their laptop were providing constant interruptions. ... Not surprisingly those who stayed on task longer and had study strategies were better students. The worst students were those who consumed more media each day and had a preference for working on several tasks at the same time and switching back and forth between them. One additional result stunned us: If they checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period they were worse students. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough."
Auothr: Larry Rosen, Psychology Today, April 9, 2012

"Which of the following procedures do you think would produce the most accurate representation of an object: tracing the object; looking at the object while drawing it; or, with your eyes closed, touching and feeling the object and then drawing it, without having ever seen it?"
Author: Kenneth Wesson, BrainWorld, March 29, 2012

Be sure to also read Jonah's response in the comments.

From one of the first chapter's in Jonah Lehrer's book Imagine.
Author: Jonah Lehrer, The Guardian, April 6, 2012

"What [Jonah Lehrer's book] Imagine and the literature about the neuroscience of creativity says is, when we need moments of insight, when we need to find far-reaching connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, when we’ve really hit the wall…that’s when we need to relax, to stop thinking about work, because the answer will only arrive when we stop looking for it."
Author: Matthew E. May

"Aerobic exercise clears the cobwebs from your mind and gives you access to insights that are out of reach when you are sedentary. On the complete flip side, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (when we are dreaming) is probably the most creative state of mind we experience daily."
Author: Christopher Bergland, Psychology Today, Feb 8, 2012

"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

"Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time how brain function differs in people who have math anxiety from those who don't. ... The [7- to 9-year-old] kids performed addition and subtraction problems while their brains were scanned using fMRI. In the children with high math anxiety, the scans showed heightened activity in the amygdala, the brain's main fear center, and also in a section of the hippocampus, a brain structure that helps form new memories. They also had decreased activity in several brain regions associated with working memory and numerical reasoning. Interestingly, analysis of brain connections showed that, in children with high math anxiety, the increased activity in the fear center was driving the reduced function in numerical information-processing regions of the brain. Further, children with high math anxiety also showed greater connections between the amygdala and emotion-regulating regions of the brain."
Author: Science Daily, March 21, 2012

Podcast and notes from an interview with Jonah Lehrer about creativity and his new book, Imagine
Author: NPR, March 12, 2012

"Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. ... The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated."

"Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television."
Author: Annie Murphy Paul, NY Times, March 17, 2012

"There is an interesting article from Jonah Lehrer over at Wired. He looks at a recent study that asked subjects to predict outcomes for 8 different events - those who people who trusted their feelings were more likely to predict the outcomes."

"There are piles of studies showing that people who lack emotions are unable to make decisions. For example, Antoine Bechara (2004) found that people who have lesions in the ventromedial (which includes the orbitofrontal) area of the prefrontal cortex (the prefrontal cortex is widely understood to be a center for decision-making and long-term planning) suffer from impaired processing of ‘‘somatic’’ or emotional signals with little or no impact on basic cognitive functions (this is his "somatic-marker hypothesis" in decision-making). Bechara found that these people had impaired decision-making skills that compromised the decision quality in their daily lives."

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

Should you trust your gut or think it through? "Results from eight studies show that individuals who had higher trust in their feelings were better able to predict the outcome of a wide variety of future events than individuals who had lower trust in their feelings…. The fact that this phenomenon was observed in eight different studies and with a variety of prediction contexts suggests that this emotional oracle effect is a reliable and generalizable phenomenon. In addition, the fact that the phenomenon was observed both when people were experimentally induced to trust or not trust their feelings and when their chronic tendency to trust or not trust their feelings was simply measured suggests that the findings are not due to any peculiarity of the main manipulation. ...So go with your gut if your energy is low. Otherwise, listen to your rational horse."
AUthor: sammcnerney, Why We Reason, March 5, 2012

How Retailers Light Up Our Brains Like Those Sparkly Holiday Luxe Displays
Author: Melanie A. Greenberg, Psychology Today, Nov 22, 2011

"'Experience'" is the marketing buzzword of our time.
It seems like every week someone is extolling the vast untapped potential of experience to move your customers ...
When I say 'experience,"' what I mean is interactions with the physical world. Moving to pick up a hot mug of coffee, the smooth, hot ceramic in your hands, smiling--these concrete happenings are experience. They seem mundane to you ... but because of the way these experiences work on your brain, they can be immensely powerful.
What we have learned over the last two decades is that these everyday interactions with the physical world are a kind of source code for your brain.
Author: Jacob Braude, Fast Company, Feb 29, 2012

A course for K-12 teachers "Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections". There are a series of videos.

"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

“...'mindfulness meditation,' is one of the most effective tools for changing our Emotional Style. In patients with depression—whom we call 'Slow to Recover' on the Resilience scale—every disappointment and setback is shattering. These patients need to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex (especially on the left side), to strengthen the neuronal highways between it and the amygdala, or both. Mindfulness meditation cultivates greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks by weakening the chain of associations that keep us obsessing about and even wallowing in a setback. It strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, promoting an equanimity that will help keep you from spiraling down."
Authors: Richard J. Davidson and Sharon Begley, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Feb 20, 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

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

"If we think others in a group are smarter, we may become dumber, temporarily losing both our problem-solving ability and what the researchers call our 'expression of IQ'."

"The clamming-up phenomenon seems to be more common in women and in people with higher IQs, according to the report, published in January in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B."
Author: Elizabeth Bernstein, WSJ, Feb 7, 2012

Response to the Wired article with the same title. "While I’ve always known that forgetting plays an important role in learning. It’d be very difficult for humans to manage if they retained everything they ever learned. Yet, we consciously do very little forgetting. We often create learning solutions that are required to learn procedures. I wonder if in addition to helping people learn, we need to include some elements that assist individuals in forgetting obsolete procedures."
Author: Abhijit Kadle, Upside Learning Blog, Feb 6, 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

"Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness." Explains how brain development impacts teens.

What to do? One solution is to provide more apprenticeships. "For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27.

"Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part. Public policy debates about teenagers thus often turn on the question of when, exactly, certain areas of the brain develop, and so at what age children should be allowed to drive or marry or vote—or be held fully responsible for crimes. But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised."
Author: Alison Gopnik, WSJ, Jan 28, 2012

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. ... A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. It turns out that the obstacles of form come with an unexpected psychological perk, allowing people to think in a more all-encompassing fashion. ... 'Consistently, these studies show that encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global, Gestalt-like processing style that automatically carries over to unrelated tasks, leading people to broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts.'"
Author: Jonah Lehrer, Wired, Nov 13, 2011
Also published in WSJ, Nov 26, 2011

"...teaching students to control their emotions prior to doing math may be the best way to overcome the math difficulties that often go along with math anxiety. Without this initial step, simply providing additional math instruction or allowing students to become distracted by trying to squelch emotions once a math exam has begun is likely to prove ineffective in producing math success." "Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago ... and PhD student Ian Lyons report their findings in the article, 'Mathematics Anxiety: Separating the Math from the Anxiety," published Oct. 20 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.'
Author: ScienceDaily, October 20, 2011

"Students who were anxious about math but performed well anyway showed high activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain when they learned a math problem was coming up; these are not the areas of the brain associated with calculating numbers, but those associated with cognitive control, focus, and regulating negative emotions. Students who activated these parts of the brain before attempting the math problem got 83 percent of the problems correct, nearly the same as the 88 percent accuracy of students with low math anxiety. By contrast, highly anxious students whose brains did not register activity in those regions got only 68 percent of the math questions correct.

Moreover, the researchers found that students' performance had less to do with how afraid they were of the coming math problem—as measured by activity in the amygdala, the brain's fear center—and more to do with how they responded to that fear. While the study focused on college-age students, the regions of the brain that govern cognitive control and emotional regulation do not completely mature until a person reaches her mid-20s, so Beilock said the effects of anxiety may be even more important for younger students."
Author: Sarah Spark, Education Week, Oct 20, 2011

An interview with A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok. "If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient ... In the first [study], published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks ... In our next studies, we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer."
Author: Claudia Dreifus, NY Times, May 30, 2011

"The rewards outweigh the risks -- when you're in a group, anyway. A new USC study explains why people take stupid chances when all of their friends are watching that they would never take by themselves. According to the study, the human brain places more value on winning in a social setting than it does on winning when you're alone."
Author: ScienceDaily

Author: Scientific American

"During childhood and adolescence, children develop the ability to remember not only past events but the origin of those memories. For example, someone may remember meeting a particular person and the context in which he or she met that person. New research from Germany has found that the ability to remember the origin of memories is a relatively long process that matures during adolescence but isn't fully developed until adulthood. The study, by researchers at Saarland University, appears in the journal Child Development. Its findings have implications for the legal arena in terms of the reliability of children's testimony."
Author: ScienceDaily, August 31, 2011

Why drama is bad for your brain.
Stress and conflicts can "lastingly alter our brains".
Author Joshua Gowin, Psychology Today, April 6, 2011

Great article about the cost of decision-making and the fatigue that sets in when people make lots of decisions and trade-offs, even if the decisions are small. Discusses social impact and how glucose levels impact decision making.
Author: John Tierney, The NY Times Magazine, August 17, 2011

Author: Greg Miller, The Washington Post, June 27, 2011

Author: Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ.com, June 13, 2011

Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, May 25, 2011

Author: Brandon Keim, Wired.com, April 27, 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)

"The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions. ... The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving. ... decision science has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all. ... The ceaseless influx trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy. ... The brain is wired to notice change, so we focus on the immediate, rather than what's important. "'Our cognitive systems,” says [psychologist Eric] Stone, “just aren’t designed to take information into account only a little.' Some people are better than others at ignoring extra information. These “sufficers” are able to say enough: they channel-surf until they find an acceptable show and then stop, whereas “maximizers” never stop surfing, devouring information, and so struggle to make a decision and move on. If you think you’re a maximizer, the best prescription for you might be the “off” switch on your smart phone."
Author: Sharon Begley, Newsweek, Feb 27, 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

"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

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

"AA doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, it doesn’t work for
the vast majority of people who try it. ...What we do know, however, is
that despite all we’ve learned over the past few decades about
psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary medicine has
yet to devise anything that works markedly better." Why or how does it
work? (1) Groups. "... there is evidence that a big part of AA’s
effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps. It may
derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group.
Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change human
behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups, rather
than treat them individually." (2) Public confession "... there is
evidence that the act of public confession—enshrined in the fifth
step—plays an especially crucial role in the recovery process. ... And
that process may help reinvigorate the prefrontal cortex, a part of the
brain that is gravely weakened by alcohol abuse.

"Elderly have better memory for 'irrelevant' information. ... A University of Toronto study shows that visual attention -- the brain’s ability to selectively filter unattended or unwanted information from reaching awareness -- diminishes with age, leaving older adults less capable of filtering out distracting or irrelevant information. Taylor Schmitz was the lead researcher. Results were published Nov. 3 in Journal of Neuroscience.
Author: Kim Luke, University of Toronto, Nov. 2, 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

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

Brain development graphic