Brain-EBOO

Showing posts with label Brain. Show all posts

Sunday, June 5, 2016

TTC Video - Optimizing Brain Fitness [Compressed]

Brain plasticity, the secret to optimizing your brain’s fitness, is one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern neuroscience. While it was traditionally thought that our brains were fully formed by adulthood, the truth is that our life experiences continually shape and mold our brains in fascinating ways. In fact, optimal brain fitness is the gateway to improvement in a range of areas, including

memory;
attention and focus;
learning and creativity; and
sensory acuity and fine motor skills.

Now, discover the secrets to increasing and expanding your brain’s power to meet everyday challenges and enhance the quality of your life with Optimizing Brain Fitness, an engaging 12-lecture course that shows you how to take advantage of the basic principles of brain operation and build the brain you want to live with for the rest of your life. Delivered by Dr. Richard Restak, an award-winning teacher, practicing neurologist, and professor at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, these lectures are packed with vital information and research-based exercises you can perform every day to tap into your hidden mental potential.

Explore Your Brain’s Most Important Functions

Optimizing Brain Fitness centers on the idea that your brain is a continual work in progress, one whose development depends on the best possible use of your brain’s most important everyday functions. You explore many functions in these lectures, with a strong focus on three.

Attention: Optimal attention skills open the door to top-notch performance in math, reading, and auditory and visual memory. They provide you with the basis for learning what to focus on and what to ignore, and they also coordinate the brain networks that involve sensation, movement, emotions, and thought.
General memory: General memory facilitates the formation, activation, and retention of neurological circuits that contribute to your brain’s optimal functioning. Memory is the veritable bedrock of superior brain health and serves as the basis of your personal identity.
Working memory: Working memory is linked with your IQ and is the first brain function to decline as you age. It is central to your ability to manipulate stored information and can easily be improved by practicing a series of simple exercises.

You’ll also spend time delving into the neurology of motor skills, visual-spatial thinking, creativity, and more.

Engage in a Wealth of Delightful Exercises

Professor Restak proves that exercising your brain doesn’t have to be a burden or a chore. Rather, it can be an exciting and eye-opening way to explore how the brain works and to discover your own brain’s potential.

Dr. Restak has designed Optimizing Brain Fitness with a wealth of exercises, challenges, practice problems, and tests that will enhance and improve your brain’s essential functions. Here is just a small sample of the enjoyable ways that you can improve your brain.

In one minute, name as many animals as you can without repeating them. You’ll have to use your working memory to mentally eliminate animals you’ve already named. A desirable score is between 17 and 20 animals.
Close your eyes and envision the room around you, and then open them and check for accuracy. Repeat this memory-recall exercise and pay closer attention to smaller details, such as the number of magazines on a table.
Take a number of spices at random and set them on a table; then close your eyes and try to identify each of them by smell alone. Take this same approach by identifying spices in a meal that you’re eating. Both exercises are great ways to sharpen your senses of smell and taste.

Winner of Georgetown University Medical School’s Linacre Medal for Humanity and Medicine, Professor Restak is an accomplished neurologist, prolific author, frequent public lecturer for prestigious institutions, and—above all—a champion of brain fitness. Rooted in the startling new findings emerging from groundbreaking experiments and detailed research studies, his course is the perfect way to maintain or improve the health of the most important organ in your body.

Insightful, instructive, and undeniably fun, Optimizing Brain Fitness is an invaluable part of your personal tool kit for lasting health and wellness.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To

From attention mechanisms to memory processing, the neuroscience of sleep and the psychology of superstition, neuroscientist Dean Burnett explores the surprising workings of the brain and the bemusing behaviours these cause in everyday life.

Unpredictable and entertaining, Burnett’s account gives us up-to-date research and the principles of neuroscience along the way. Looking at memory, intelligence, observation, social interaction and personality, Burnett explains why:

* memory is like a doting mother;

* tall people are more intelligent;

* criticism is more powerful than praise;

* we remember faces before names;

* a glass of wine can refresh your memory;

* and you can’t be ‘a little bit OCD’.

Monday, May 9, 2016

Susannah Cahalan - Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness [Audiobook] [Repost]

A gripping memoir and medical suspense story about a young New York Post reporters struggle with a rare and terrifying disease, opening a new window into the fascinating world of brain science. One day, Susannah Cahalan woke up in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. Her medical recordsfrom a month-long hospital stay of which she had no memoryshowed psychosis, violence, and dangerous instability. Yet, only weeks earlier she had been a healthy, ambitious twenty-four year old, six months into her first serious relationship and a sparkling career as a cub reporter. Susannahs astonishing memoir chronicles the swift path of her illness and the lucky, last-minute intervention led by one of the few doctors capable of saving her life. As weeks ticked by and Susannah moved inexplicably from violence to catatonia, $ 1 million worth of blood tests and brain scans revealed nothing. The exhausted doctors were ready to commit her to the psychiatric ward, in effect condemning her to a lifetime of institutions, or death, until Dr. Souhel Najjarnicknamed Dr. Housejoined her team. He asked Susannah to draw one simple sketch, which became key to diagnosing her with a newly discovered autoimmune disease in which her body was attacking her brain, an illness now thought to be the cause of demonic possessions throughout history. With sharp reporting drawn from hospital records, scientific research, and interviews with doctors and family, Brain on Fire is a crackling mystery and an unflinching, gripping personal story that marks the debut of an extraordinary writer.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based Teaching

Establishing the parameters and goals of the new field of mind, brain, and education science.

A groundbreaking work, Mind, Brain, and Education Science explains the new transdisciplinary academic field that has grown out of the intersection of neuroscience, education, and psychology. The trend in “brain-based teaching” has been growing for the past twenty years and has exploded in the past five to become the most authoritative pedagogy for best learning results. Aimed at teachers, teacher trainers and policy makers, and anyone interested in the future of education in America and beyond, Mind, Brain, and Education Science responds to the clamor for help in identifying what information could and should apply in classrooms with confidence, and what information is simply commercial hype. Combining an exhaustive review of the literature, as well as interviews with over twenty thought leaders in the field from six different countries, this book describes the birth and future of this new and groundbreaking discipline. Mind, Brain, and Education Science looks at the foundations, standards, and history of the field, outlining the ways that new information should be judged. Well-established information is elegantly separated from “neuromyths” to help teachers split the wheat from the chaff in classroom planning, instruction and teaching methodology.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better

In this compelling, cutting-edge book, two generations of science writers explore the exciting science of “body maps” in the brain–and how startling new discoveries about the mind-body connection can change and improve our lives. Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? What makes video games so addictive? How can “practicing” your favorite sport in your imagination improve your game? The answers can be found in body maps.

Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they create your physical and emotional awareness and your sense of being a whole, feeling self in a larger social world.

Moreover, your body maps are profoundly elastic. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. This space morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, ride a bike, or wield a tool. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. When you watch a scary movie, your body maps put dread in your stomach and send chills down your spine. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better–whether it is playing tennis, strumming a guitar, riding a horse, dancing a waltz, empathizing with a friend, raising children, or coping with stress.

The story of body maps goes even further, providing a fresh look at the causes of anorexia, bulimia, obsessive plastic surgery, and the notorious golfer’s curse “the yips.” It lends insights into culture, language, music, parenting, emotions, chronic pain, and more.

Filled with illustrations, wonderful anecdotes, and even parlor tricks that you can use to reconfigure your body sense, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own will change the way you think–about the way you think.

“The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.”

–Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain

“Through a stream of fascinating and entertaining examples, Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee illustrate how our perception of ourselves, and indeed the world, is not fixed but is surprisingly fluid and easily modified. They have created the best book ever written about how our sense of ‘self’ emerges from the motley collection of neurons we call the brain.”

–Jeff Hawkins, co-author of On Intelligence

“The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.”

–Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain

“A marvelous book. In the last ten years there has been a paradigm shift in understanding the brain and how its various specialized regions respond to environmental challenges. In addition to providing a brilliant overview of recent revolutionary discoveries on body image and brain plasticity, the book is sprinkled with numerous insights.”

–V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego