A new study published in Neurology has found that older people with higher concentrations of vitamins B, C, D, and E may have better mental functioning. The study was conducted in people who had an average age of 87, and noted that the more vitamins found in the subjects’ bloodstream, the better they performed on [...]

1. Less Meat in Middle Age, Better Memory When You’re Older?
2. Nuts For Brain Health!
3. Brain Plasticity Inc. to Receive $3.65 Million Funding for Schizophrenia & Stroke Research

Do long, dark winter nights get you down? For those affected with the form of depression known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), the winter can be a difficult time. The National Health Service of the UK estimates that 7% of Britons are affected by SAD, and U.S. estimates hover between 4% and 6%. According to Mayo [...]

1. Why Would An Older Driver Run A Red Light?

In the excellent blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer offers his take on a couple of recent studies about how a person’s reaction to mistakes, and subsequent feedback about the mistakes, affect the learning process. The findings might interest you, especially if you are a parent with school-aged children. One recent study focused on why [...]

1. Learning, Thinking, Feeling: People vs. Animals
2. A Faster Brain = A Smarter Brain?
3. NUMMI Closes… The Employees’ Ability to Learn Will Help Them Move Forward

In a groundbreaking new study, a team of (very serious) academics have determined that a total of 704 head injuries occur in the 34 Asterix and Obelix comic books. That’s almost 21 per book! The researchers ranked the severity of the injuries on the standard Glasgow coma scale, and found that a shocking 390 of them fit [...]

1. Brain Trauma and Lou Gehrig’s Disease
2. Biomarkers and Brain Injury
3. Traumatic Brain Injury: It’s More Common, More Frightening, and More Preventable Than You Think

With all the bad news in the world, this is a terrifically enthusiastic and uplifting talk about research on the positive effects of smiling. Ron Gutman talks about how smiling is a “superpower” and discusses a body of work including some very interesting research. In one example, he notes that based on the smiles in [...]

1. Predicting the Future
2. Dopamine, Expectations, and Happiness

We’ve written about the high incidence of debilitating concussions related to sports like football and ice hockey on this blog before. We could easily write about other sports that can injure your head, like boxing or skiing. Many people debate what the best way to deal with sports-related brain injuries might be. One of the [...]

1. Depression Increases the Risk of Developing Dementia
2. Posit Science training programs provide many real-world benefits
3. Loss of Smell May Predict Alzheimer’s

Someone very close to me is absolutely terrified of going to the dentist, so my interest was piqued when I saw a report about a German study on the varying effectiveness of treatments for dental anxiety. The study concluded that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is more effective in treating dental phobia than standardized hypnosis or general [...]

1. Top 12 Brain-Based Reasons Why Music as Therapy Works
2. The Brain and Emotional Control
3. Mild Cognitive Impairment More Common in Men Than Women

I was recently reading an article about the psychology of architecture on one of my favorite neuroscience blogs, The Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer. I was particularly drawn to his mention of a study conducted in 2009 by Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu that compared people’s performance on different types of tasks whether they were [...]

1. Unconstrain Your Brain
2. Brain Plasticity Cuts Both Ways: How Does Technology Affect The Brains of Children?
3. Saluting our Soldiers Series: Part 4 – Cognition and Combat

The results of the 7th Annual Best Illusion of the Year are in! The winner: “Silencing awareness of change by background motion.” Though of the top 10 finalists, I personally like “Mask of Love.” If you’d like to see a collection of fun illusions that befuddle the brain, check out our Brain Teasers page. You [...]

1. Video: “Your Brain Is Badly Wired – Enjoy It!”
2. Adelson’s Amazing Optical Illusion
3. Brain Wiring & New Year’s Resolutions

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle just released results of a recent study. The researchers were looking at “chemobrain,” a type of cognitive impairment that occurs following chemotherapy treatment. The study showed that tpost-chemo cognitive impairment may be longer lasting and more severe than generally believed. This finding is important because even today, some doctors [...]

1. Brain Scan Study Provides Further Evidence of Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Decline
2. Chemobrain and cognitive training
3. HIV-Related Cognitive Decline – Webinar with Dr. Sean Rourke