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 [...]

“No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.” George Bernard Shaw said that, and as someone who aims to learn as many languages as one lifespan permits, I am delighted to report that the findings of cognitive and linguistic research have actually demonstrated au contraire. Take this Dartmouth College study from way [...]

Disney recently announced that it is offering refunds on Baby Einstein DVDs purchased in the past five years. Why? Baby Einstein claimed to make babies “smarter,” but doesn’t. In fact, research suggests that if anything, watching such DVDs slows learning development in young children. Threatened with a class-action lawsuit, Disney began to offer the refunds. [...]