Can Boomers’ Brains Be Saved?

There’s a lot of marketing being done for ‘brain fitness’ devices and methods, and of course there’s big bucks to be made when your target market is baby boomers.
Interesting conversation going on between a few blogs on this topic. At Psych Central summing up a post at PsyBlog, asserts that the most evidence-based cognitive enhancer [...]

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Vacation

I’ll be out of town and not posting until July 11th at the earliest.

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New Blog: Psychology Today

Mindhacks notes the launching Psychology Today’s formidable blog:
Popular psychology magazine Psychology Today have launched their own blog network with some of the biggest names in psychology, psychiatry and philosophy of mind regularly writing for it.
As a magazine, PsyToday has had a long reputation for being a bit populist and light on what most psychologists what [...]

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Depression Linked to Everything

Furious Seasons June 18 entry points out:
Depression Linked to Absolutely Everything, Solutions Elusive. A new study is out today in JAMA asserting a link between type 2 diabetes and depression and vice-versa. The study now joins reams of studies in recent years–many of them by non-psychiatrists, just to be clear–that link depression with seemingly every [...]

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Twenty-Fifth Edition of Brain Blogging Carnival

Brain Blogger’s 35th edition of the Brain Blogging Carnival. It includes these links. All the descriptions are straight from Brain Blogger. There are about 15 other interesting stories to delve into, but here are a few:
Read or Die! presents Increase your Brainpower now!:
As I was reading the January issue of Reader’s Digest mag I found [...]

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Portrait of Dissociative Identity Disorder

Everyone Needs Therapy has posted (June 18th) a disturbing, but informative, portrait of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Once known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Almost invariable the person diagnosed has suffered severe sexual trauma, often at the hands of a parent.
Well, hopefully it doesn’t apply to you, Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.)
But it might. We used to call [...]

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Brain Scan or Brain Scam?

Marketing neuroscience to the public. Daniel Carlat casts a skeptical glance, in Wired, on some potentially exciting new brain scanning technology. He’s not against neuroscience or brain scans, but cautious about the way these new technologies are being marketed to the public. The title of the piece: “Brain Scans as Mind Readers: Don’t Believe the [...]

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Self Esteem Run Amok

From a recent (via Ken Pope’s listserv) Houston Chronicle story on self esteem.
As Dr. Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me, points out, most self-esteem programs encourage kids to feel good about themselves for no particular reason.
Here’s the important finding from a self-esteem study:
Starting in the mid-1990s, a team led by psychologist Carol Dweck [...]

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Where Does Brain Become Mind?

Or is there a difference? This remains a heated discussion in cognitive sciences, neuroscience, philosophy. No answer in sight really. But here’s a snapshot of the complexity of your brain. Taken from Daniel Carlat’s piece in Wired:
A typical brain contains 100 billion neurons, each of which makes electrical connections, or synapses, with up to 10,000 [...]

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A Blog For the Week: The Neurocritic

A blog of note: The Neurocritic. Just another great blog that keeps an eye on science and trends in scientific thought.
The full name of the blog is: The Neurocritic: Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology. Neurocritic seems to specialize in keeping the “bio” part of biopsychosocial [...]

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