Contributing author Paul Li is a graduate student in neuroscience at Columbia. Here he explains a new reason to avoid stress:
Whoever came up with the saying ‘take a chill pill’ probably did not know it can also mean having long-term cognitive benefits regarding a healthier, working brain. See our past post on the importance of [...]
Michael Posner, a famous cognitive psychologist, describes how attention training can affect the brain of a young child (4-6 years) in this video. They found that after five sessions of attention training, the “brain waves” (from the video, these appear to be event-related potentials) measured by EEG more closely resembled those of an adult, which [...]
Working memory capacity is closely related to general intelligence. This has been observed in several different studies that evaluate the correlation between measures of intelligence and working memory.
A study published last week affirmed this finding, and also furthered our understanding of the factors underlying working memory capacity. Awh, Barton, and Vogel’s research showed that working [...]
Mounting evidence suggests that omega-3 fatty acids are good for your brain. Thanks to Marge, a cow from New Zealand with a fortuitous genetic mutation, milk or butter could soon be a good source of omega-3s. Marge produces milk with elevated levels of omega-3s and reduced saturated fat, making her milk better for the brain [...]
Elizabeth Buchen, neuroscientist, science writer and advisor to Lumos Labs, explains why working memory is such a critical cognitive process, and how it works:
In an earlier post, I described the cognitive process of “attention,” which allows the brain to manage the surfeit of the world’s information by selecting only the most relevant information at any [...]
I used to consider coffee consumption to be a mild vice, but there are several ways that caffeinated coffee can benefit the brain:
Immediate improvements in certain cognitive abilities: reaction time, short-term memory, attention and alertness.
A lifetime of drinking coffee is correlated with better cognitive function in old age.
Coffee (including decaf) is an excellent source of [...]
Will taking ginkgo biloba help my memory?
Ginkgo biloba, a tree that has been cultivated in China for thousands of years, is widely heralded as a useful memory enhancer, and sells by the boatload. In fact, there is little if any reliable evidence that ginkgo actually improves memory in healthy people. The only trusted study that [...]
