This weekend, I read a fascinating article in Wired magazine about stress and your health. (The article isn’t online yet, but the author of the article, Jonah Lehrer, has pieces of the article on his blog.) Lehrer talked to primatologist Robert Sapolsky about stress in humans and animals, and how it affects health. (We’ve previously [...]

A recent article by Fran Johns, a great True/Slant contributor who has written about Posit Science, talks all about telomeres. If you don’t know what telomeres are (I didn’t), they are protective caps on our chromosomes that help to regulate cell aging. Long telomeres = “younger” cellular age and better cell health. Short telomeres = “older” [...]

Viewing television and playing video games each are associated with increased subsequent attention problems in childhood.

There was a deeply jarring article in the New York Times earlier this week that told the story of an extended Colombian family with unprecedented rates of early-onset Alzheimer’s. How their incredible suffering might hold the key for discovering a cure for Alzheimer’s is the subject of the article. Young people in this family grow [...]

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps produce a reward response in the brain. This response kicks into action when we do something pleasurable- like eating highly palatable food. It is known that there is a reduction in this reward response in obese people. However, it is unclear whether the reduction in reward precedes obesity and [...]

Ask a group of people what the difference between animals and humans are, and they will probably come up with as many answers as there are individuals in the group. But my guess is that many of them will come up with some variation of this: that it’s our amazing brains–our ability to learn, to [...]

It has become clear over the last few years that one of the many benefits of regular physical exercise is a better functioning brain. In a recent review paper Erickson and Kramer (2009) noted the following: People who exercise regularly have larger volumes of grey matter in important regions of the brain, including the prefrontal, [...]

Recently, I read an article about the promise of a nutritional drink called Souvenaid for Alzheimer’s treatment. (My co-worker wrote a great blog post about it a couple of weeks ago.) As reported in CNN, early studies showed the drink had the potential to improve certain types of memory in Alzheimer’s patients. Then I found [...]

At the Transportation Research Board annual meeting last year I attended a talk by Dr. Fredric Wolinsky of the University of Iowa. Along with his colleagues, he conducted an analysis of participants in the ACTIVE clinical trial, the largest study of cognitive training performed to date. He found that people who had done ten hours [...]

Recently, scientists at MIT tested a specially-designed nutritional drink to see whether it could improve cognitive function in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. (Here’s an article in CNN on the subject.) The drink includes three key nutrients: uridine, choline (part of the vitamin B family) and DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid). These are nutrients that [...]