Brain Fitness

Targeting Boomers or seniors with your advertising? Keep it simple. While that's usually good advice for any kind of advertising, brain scans show a dramatic difference in the ability of older brains to suppress distracting…

Want to boost your creativity by investing a quarter or so? Buy a lightbulb. Not the fancy LED, halogen, or compact fluorescent variety - just the old-fashioned, cheap incandescent kind that come in four-packs for a buck or so.…

Book Review: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge For centuries, the human brain was considered largely immutable after childhood. We were told that we had…

We'd all like to think better, but few of us have the time or desire to, say, spend years in a Tibetan monastery learning to meditate. Past studies have shown that such extended training can indeed improve cognitive functioning.…

Neuromarketing readers know I sometimes venture into the non-marketing area of brain fitness, and I couldn't resist passing along this bit of research on cell phone use. For years, we've been hearing alarming claims that cell phone use…

Just-published research in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences shows that volunteering and similar social activities are helpful in staving off mental decline in later years, and can actually improve cognition.

This isn't great news for dieters, but sometimes sugar can be a good thing. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, had subjects perform a mentally taxing task - watching a video while being careful to ignore random…

Once again, I'm going to depart from marketing for one post for another neuroparenting topic. This time, it's about kids "talking back" to their parents and how that interaction can actually enhance cognitive development.

We know that making ourselves smile or frown can actually influence our mood, and now it seems that the posture we assume can affect our confidence in our own thoughts. A study by Richard Petty, who apparently is not the NASCAR driver…

I don't often get into neuro-parenting here, but I thought this particular research finding was interesting enough to single out. (I mentioned it in my Managing by Mistakes post last week, too.) The short story is that a lot of what…