You may have read (about a month ago) that a Cambridge University group tracked the life-spans of 20,000 Brits, as it was affected by a number of factors that plausibly relate to it. Those included: 1) Eating your fruits and veggies every day; 2) drinking a little wine and whiskey—but not TOO much, every day;…
Memory (cognitive ability, executive control, motor control, whatever) resides in a place(s). If we fix that (those) place(s), we fix memory (our failing faculties). For MEMORY, as an example, most scientists focus on one of three places: the hippocampus, for ‘episodic’ or ‘long-term memory’; the inferior/medial temporal or lateral frontal cortex, for ‘immediate’ or ‘working…
In early October, I attended a meeting sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the McKnight Foundation considering the general subject of cognitive decline in aging populations. I found the meeting to be useful, and distressing. Useful, because this subject is now on the front burner for the NIA, just as it is for…
Traveling in Mexico and observing the operation of Mexican families has brought a simple question to my mind: Why are Mexican-American soldiers from the Iraq War significantly more susceptible than other ethnicities for developing post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs)? Does their “weakness” reflect genetic contributions to their risk for PTSD, or, more likely perhaps, does it…
About two weeks ago, Posit Science was visited by a family who appeared to have greatly benefited from the use of our exercises in BrainHQ. This family’s story began with a late-night boating accident involving a beloved young son, circa 20 years of age. The boat that Ryan was riding in was struck by a…
Like many of you, I have spent quite a few hours over the past 10 days watching the Ken Burns PBS program personalizing World War II. I thought that it brought this war home for me, more informatively and more poignantly than all but a few of the great War movies (All’s Quiet on the…
About a month ago, results from a NIMH-sponsored statistical study that determined the rate at which children were being labelled and treated for bipolar disorder were published, and reported widely in the popular press (I initially read about it on September 4th in the Sunday New York Times). Twenty years ago, bipolar disorder was a…
Some months ago, after my grand-daughter Leila’s school in Oakland, California burned down and its rebuilding seems to be drowning in a bureaucratic swamp, I predicted that it would NEVER be rebuilt in time to begin the 2007-8 school year on time. I was wrong. The Oakland Unified School District and the contractors that they…
I know a 16-year-old boy who is addicted to video games. By ‘addiction’, I mean that he is compelled to play them for several to many hours each day, even while he knows that it is in his own best interests to limit his play time, even while his parents continually (ineffectively) try to curtail…