Brains On Purpose™

Excellent book PLAY YOUR BRAIN now easier for those of us in the US to buy

I am reading Play Your Brain: Adopt a Musical Mindset and Change Your Life and Career by Anette Prehn and Kjeld Fredens, and I recommend that you read it, too. (Click to read testimonials for the book.) Prehn is a journalist which makes for a well-written book (a quality which is more and more rare in books these days), and she writes in consultation with a neuroscientist so the book is brain savvy.

An important bonus: Prehn uses a metaphor that works very well for ease of understanding—music! As readers here know, music is a focus on this blog; another reason why this book is holding my interest so well. If you are interested in the practical applications of brain science, buy Play Your Brain now.

You may purchase the book by clicking here or here.

I will post a review when I have finished Play Your Brain. In the meanwhile, here are just a couple of the testimonials from a whole page of them:

Embodied and grounded cognition: A short introduction

In the past, I have posted several times about the intriguing topic of embodied cognition. Basically it looks at how we think with more than just our brains and minds, and what our bodies knows that our brains and minds do not.

From Frontiers in Cognition, we have been given a short overview of some aspects of embodied and grounded cognition. Excerpt:

1. Introduction

In the last 10-15 years, the embodied and grounded (E&G) cognition approach has become widespread in all fields related to cognitive (neuro) science, and a lot of evidence has been collected. The approach proposes that cognitive activity is grounded in sensory-motor processes and situated in specific contexts and situations.

This special topic had two aims: First, give an idea of the field in its broadness. Second, focus on some challenges for E&G theories. The first important challenge is to account for understanding abstract concepts and words. Evidence on the representation of concrete concepts is compelling, whereas evidence on abstract concepts is still scarce and limited to

Become a wizard? Become a vampire? Become a collaborative disputant?

This research had me smiling about both real and fantasy-realm possibilities. How about you? What do you think? Could the narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis be used in mediation?

Abstract of "Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective-Assimilation Hypothesis" (Psychological Science):

We propose the narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis—that experiencing a narrative leads one to psychologically become a part of the collective described within the narrative. In a test of this hypothesis, participants read passages from either a book about wizards (from the Harry Potter series) or a book about vampires (from the Twilight series). Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that participants who read about wizards psychologically became wizards, whereas those who read about vampires psychologically became vampires. The results also suggested that narrative collective assimilation is psychologically meaningful and relates to the basic human need for connection. Specifically, the tendency to fulfill belongingness needs through group affiliation moderated the extent to which narrative collective assimilation occurred, and narrative collective assimilation led to increases in life satisfaction and positive mood, two primary outcomes of belonging. The implications for the importance of narratives, the need to belong to groups, and social surrogacy are discussed.

Excerpt:

New book on the brain and some theories about how we are swayed: HONEST PERSUADERS

Another book on neuromarketing. From "Books Special: Why everything you know about advertising may be wrong" (management today):

There are two reasons why I think MT readers will like this book. One, it's a business book for grown-ups - so there are no facile titles, no bullet-points for the attention-challenged, no simplifying to the lowest common denominator. Yet for a book that's part marketing treatise, part neuroscience essay, it's surprisingly accessible; Bunyard has chosen to interweave his thesis with a narrative about how these ideas have developed over the course of his professional life, which prevents the book sliding into abstraction on the one hand, or self-aggrandisement on the other.

Two, it's admirably rational and evidence-based. There's no rhetoric or grand-standing or speculation; all the arguments are based on experimental data, which makes it more compelling. Perhaps advances in neuroscience or improvements in experimental techniques will prove Bunyard's theories to be bunkum. But he would have no complaint about that; that's science, after all, and he'd argue that we'd still be a little closer to the truth.

Upcoming conference on cognitive and working memory training

The abstracts of the presentations that will be included at the conference being held in August indicate this will be an excellent event. Click to read them and to see the stellar lineup of speakers.

From the event page:

The University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) is hosting a 2½-day workshop that features a series of presentations and panel discussions by leading scientists, with participation from U.S. government stakeholders and interested parties from industry.
Topics for discussion include:

• Benefits of cognitive training across a range of measures, including intelligence, working memory, vision, learning, creativity, and language processing, in both healthy and special populations.
• Best practices in the field regarding methods, tools, designs, and uses for theoretical, computational, and applied purposes.
• Summaries of the workshop presentations, including what we have learned over the past few years and what remains to be learned about the advantages, uses, and even potential caveats of cognitive training. Dr. Nelson Cowan (University of Missouri-Columbia) and Dr. Robert Logie (The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) have agreed to serve as expert commentators.

One major goal of the workshop is to produce, within a year, an edited volume with chapters authored by participants and their collaborators. We anticipate that such a book will be a key contribution to the field, coalescing a host of research efforts on cognitive training and cognitive plasticity into a single book, and that it will be accessible to researchers in the cognitive and neural sciences, practitioners, and students.

 

If I'm right-handed, am I right-minded? What if you are right-minded and I am left-handed? Can we talk?

For a clue to the answers to those questions, let's look at some more research on the body-specificity hypothesis. Abstract from "Different Bodies, Different Minds: The body-specificity of language and thought" (Current Directions in Psychological Science):

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto 2009), they should. In this article, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond concrete actions, the way people use their hands also influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence,” and how they communicate about them in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can cause them to think differently, suggesting that motoric differences between right- and left-handers are not merely correlated with cognitive differences. Body-specific patterns of motor experience shape the way we think, communicate, and make decisions.

Click to read the whole article.

What's in Store for Your 21st Century Brain?

From the Web site of the American Museum of Natural History:

Mechanical devices now connect to the brain to restore lost senses like hearing and sight. What if similar technologies could end addiction, improve memory, cure a headache, or lift one’s mood? These and other amazing facets of current brain research are explored in the Museum exhibition Brain: The Inside Story in a section called Your 21st Century Brain.

Here, visitors can see a video in which researchers try to decode language directly within the brain through a brain-computer interface that has the potential for manipulating a

Autumn conference in Aspen - "Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning: Implications for Education"

Any of you coming to Colorado for this event? I'd like to hear (or hear again) some of these speakers . . .

From the event Web pages:

Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning: Implications for Education

September 22 - 24, 2011
The Aspen Institute

Presented by The New York Academy of Sciences and The Aspen Brain Forum Foundation

New discoveries in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience hold great promise for improving current teaching methods. Yet there remains a significant gap between the scientific discoveries that could improve our education system and the application of this knowledge. This meeting will highlight cutting-edge developments in cognitive neuroscience that could improve current teaching methods and will include a careful review of the current obstacles to applying these methods in the classroom as well as the related emotional, sociological and environmental factors.

Click to see the roster of speakers.

The 47th Nobel Conference: The Brain and Being Human

From the event's Web page:

The 47th annual Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, scheduled for Oct. 4-5, 2011, is titled The Brain and Being Human and will engage audience members with topics and discussion in the field of neuroscience.

Understanding what it is to be human means understanding the brain. This intriguing scientific challenge has grabbed the attention of more and more people from all walks of life. You may have noticed how often brain science pops up; breakthroughs are highlighted in the news almost daily and even serve as the basis for TV entertainment in shows like Law and Order or interviews on the Colbert Report. The

Interview with Jeffrey Schwartz, MD, on how to rewire your brain, problems with materialism in science, and his new book

Click to listen to an excellent interview [link is also below] in which Dr. Jeff Schwartz talks with Michael Ray Dresser about the new book You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life, and the many problems with thinking your brain controls who you are, what you think, and how you act.

Jeff says, "The brain can control your entire life if you let it." He then talks about why you would not want your brain to be in control, how to make sure you are not living a rat-like, habit-driven life, and the benefits of living life in a conscious, discerning, and mindful way.

The interviewer is very skilled and knowledgeable, and Jeff is articulate, passionate, and clear. Highly recommended!

Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz-6-30-2011-Track 1