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A five-week training program to improve working memory has significantly improved working memory, attention, and organization in many children and adolescents with ADHD.

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Being actively involved improves learning significantly, and new research shows that the hippocampus is at the heart of this process.

We know active learning is better than passive learning, but for the first time a study gives us some idea of how that works. Participants in the imaging study were asked to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer screen.

New research has come up with a very easy remedy for those who sabotage themselves in exams by being over-anxious — spend a little time writing out your worries just before the test.

It’s well known that being too anxious about an exam can make you perform worse, and studies indicate that part of the reason for this is that your limited

A second study confirms the dramatic effect of being bilingual, with bilingual speakers being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s more than 4 years later than monoglots.

Clinical records of 211 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease have revealed that those who have spoken two or more languages consistently over many years experienced a delay in the onset of their symptoms by as much as five years.

A small study suggests that physical activity may be of greater benefit to those carrying the Alzheimer’s gene in protecting against cognitive decline.

A study involving 68 healthy older adults (65-85) has compared brain activity among four groups, determined whether or not they carry the Alzheimer’s gene ApoE4 and whether their physical activity is reported to be high or low.

Two new studies show us that recovery after brain damage is not as simple as one region ‘taking over’ for another, and that some regions are more easily helped than others.

When stroke or brain injury damages a part of the brain controlling movement or sensation or language, other parts of the brain can learn to compensate for this damage. It’s been thought that this is a case of one region taking over the lost function.

A genome study has found a gene variant that leads to greater right-hand skill in dyslexics, but not others. The gene is implicated in embryonic development.

While brain laterality exists widely among animal species, the strong dominance of right-handedness in humans is something of an anomaly.

Evidence that illiterates use a brain region involved in reading for face processing to a greater extent than readers do, suggests that reading may have hijacked the network used for object recognition.

An imaging study of 10 illiterates, 22 people who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, has confirmed that the visual word form area (involved in linking sounds with written symbols) showed more activation in better readers, although everyone had similar levels of activation i

Playing Tetris shortly after a traumatic event reduced flashbacks, but playing a word-based quiz increased the number of flashbacks.

Following a study showing that playing Tetris after traumatic events could reduce memory flashbacks in healthy volunteers, two experiments have found playing Tetris after viewing traumatic images significantly reduced flashbacks while playing Pub Quiz Machine 2008 (a word-based quiz game) increa

More support for the theory that bigger brains were a response to living in social groups comes from a wide-ranging comparison of 511 mammalian species, but a comparison of wasp brains over time points to the importance of parasitism.

A comparison of the brain and body size of over 500 species of living and fossilised mammals has found that the brains of monkeys grew the most over 60 million years, followed by horses, dolphins, camels and dogs. Those with relatively bigger brains tend to live in stable social groups.

A study involving skilled typists shows how the part of a person that does the thinking relies on different feedback than the part that does the doing.

There are a number of ways experts think differently from novices (in their area of expertise).

An imaging study has found three different brain signatures discriminating children with autistic spectrum disorders, siblings of children with ASD, and other typically-developing children.

Last month I reported on a finding that toddlers with autism spectrum disorder showed a strong preference for looking at moving shapes rather than active people.

An imaging study has revealed how one of the many genes implicated in autism is associated with an atypical pattern of connectivity between the hemispheres and within and from the frontal lobe.

Many genes have been implicated in autism; one of them is the CNTNAP2 gene.

The intraparietal sulcus appears to be a hub for connecting the different sensory-processing areas as well as higher-order processes, and may be key to attention problems.

If our brains are full of clusters of neurons resolutely only responding to specific features (as suggested in my earlier report), how do we bring it all together, and how do we switch from one point of interest to another?

A month-long training program has enabled volunteers to instantly recognize very faint patterns.

In a study in which 14 volunteers were trained to recognize a faint pattern of bars on a computer screen that continuously decreased in faintness, the volunteers became able to recognize fainter and fainter patterns over some 24 days of training, and this correlated with stronger EEG signals fro

Object perception rests on groups of neurons that respond to specific attributes.

New imaging techniques used on macaque monkeys explains why we find it so easy to scan many items quickly when we’re focused on one attribute, and how we can be so blind to attributes and objects we’re not focused on.

A small study suggests beet juice may improve blood flow in important regions of the brain in older adults.

Following on from previous studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, a study involving 14 older adults (average age 75) has found that after two days of eating a high-nitrate breakfast, which included 16 ounces of beet juice, blood flow to the

Findings from a rat study show how TBI can begin a process that continues to deform the brain long after the original injury.

A rat study using powerful imaging techniques has revealed how an injured brain continues to change long after the original trauma.

Two recent studies indicate that the presence of protein in the urine, even in small amounts, could be a warning sign that a patient may develop cognitive impairment with age.

A six-year study involving over 1200 older women (70+) has found that low amounts of albumin in the urine, at levels not traditionally considered clinically significant, strongly predict faster cognitive decline in older women.

A hamster study indicates that chronic jet lag changes the brain in ways that cause long-lasting memory and learning problems.

Twice a week for four weeks, female hamsters were subjected to six-hour time shifts equivalent to a New York-to-Paris airplane flight.

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