"You can teach an old dog new tricks, say UCLA scientists who found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web." - Physorg.com (Oct 2009)
"Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does!" - Miller-McCune (Sept 2009)
Enriched Environment
"Diamond and her team of researchers studied three rat groups: a group of 12 rats in a large cage with a variety of toys, a group of three rats (the "standard"), and a lone rat in a small cage. The researchers' results consistently showed that the more playmates and toys a rat had, the larger its brain structures consequently grew." - The Daily Californian (Oct 2003)
"On the other hand, enriched animal environments—enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat—lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain. - SEED Magazine (Feb 2006)
"Both control and SE rats exposed to the enriched environment performed significantly better than the nonenriched group in the water maze." - Neurology (2002)
Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear. —H.A. Dorfman
"Self-regulation Abilities, Beyond Intelligence, Play Major Role In Early Achievement" - Science Daily (March 2007)
"Early childhood development researchers have discovered that a simple, five-minute self-regulation game not only can predict end-of-year achievement in math, literacy and vocabulary, but also was associated with the equivalent of several months of additional learning in kindergarten." - Science Daily (June 2009)
"Aspects of personality can be even more important than IQ when it comes to predicting workplace performance and academic success." - BPS Reseach (Oct 2008)
"A new study provides further evidence for the important role of mindfulness in self-regulatory success." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (July 2009)
"Children high on attention - defined as staying focused on a task and persisting at problem solving - had better health as adults, as did children low on distress-proneness" - Psycholodgy Today Blog (May 2009)
"The new focus on grit is part of a larger scientific attempt to study the personality traits that best predict achievement in the real world. While researchers have long focused on measurements of intelligence, such as the IQ test, as the crucial marker of future success, these scientists point out that most of the variation in individual achievement - what makes one person successful, while another might struggle - has nothing to do with being smart. Instead, it largely depends on personality traits such as grit and conscientiousness. It's not that intelligence isn't really important - Newton was clearly a genius - but that having a high IQ is not nearly enough." - The Frontal Cortex (August 2009)
"Children who had the best average scores in standardized tests in reading, math, science and social studies were fit at the start and end of the study, researchers found. The next best group, academically, in all four subjects, was made up of children who were not fit in fifth grade but had become fit by seventh grade. The children who had lost their fitness levels between fifth and seventh grades were third in academic performance. Children who were not physically fit in either the fifth or seventh grades had the lowest academic performance." - Science Daily (March 2010)
"Older women who did an hour or two of strength training exercises each week had improved cognitive function a year later, scoring higher on tests of the brain processes responsible for planning and executing tasks, a new study has found." - The New York Times (Jan 2010)
"Exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss, U.S. researchers reported on Monday." - Reuters (March 2007)
"Allow a laboratory mouse to run as much as it likes, and its brainpower improves. Force it to run harder than it otherwise might, and its thinking improves even more." - New York Times Blogs (Sept 2009)
"Preschool children who were enrolled in a creative dance movement program as part of their Head Start experience had greater gains in social competence and more reductions in behavior problems than children who were given a cognitively-based program of learning to control attention that did not include a body sense component." - Psychology Today Blog (Oct 2009)
"But a new study presented at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience shows how disrupting your sleep cycle can interfere with your health and cognitive function... A recent article in the New York Times reported on a study from Stanford showing that sleeping 10 hours a night improved the performance of athletes. The interesting thing about this study was how great everyone felt sleeping 10 hours a day-as if they had never known what their actual potential was when they were sleep-deprived." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (Oct 2009)
"The researchers found that there was a significant blunting in the ability of those who had been tested while sleep deprived to distinguish between angry and happy facial expressions in the moderate intensity range. This difference disappeared after recovery sleep, and was greater in women than in men." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (March 2010)
"In this week's post, I want to elaborate on how external incentives such as rewards can hurt motivation in those who are already interested in an activity." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (June 2009)
"Each one of us has stories of the positives and negatives of rewards. Part of the answer lies in whether an individual is motivated to take part in an activity. As we saw last week, if the answer is ‘yes', rewards can be dangerous. If the answer is ‘no', then a reward may be just what the doctor prescribed." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (July 2009)
"Tom and I were observing a difference between what Jack had learned and what he was motivated to do." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (July 2009)
"Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas." - Science Daily (March 2008)
"The Amateur License: Making a Hobby of Creativity. Amateur arts and crafts affect personal and professional creativity." - Psychology Today Blog (Feb 2010)
Music
"For more long-lasting effects, however, research shows that learning how to make music is more importantfor positive long-term changes than just listening to music. Music instruction literally changes the brain, possibly increasing the corpus callosum (the bit of the brain that enables cross-talk between the two hemispheres of the brain). Music instruction may increase working memory, and boost specific skills that are directly related to music such as fine motor skill." - Psychology Today Blog (April 2010)
"Musicians have better memory -- not just for music, but words and pictures too" - Cognitive Daily (May 2009)
"Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music." - Science Daily (March 2009)
"A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training—not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity (skills honed by the study of a musical instrument), but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion (skills not normally associated with music)." - Science Daily (Nov 2008)
"Children who received at least three years (M = 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills). Duration of training also predicted these outcomes." - Plos One (Oct 2008)
"Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study." - Science Daily (Sept 2007)
"Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training." - Science Daily (Sept 2006)
"However, the kids who took music lessons did show a significantly greater IQ rise than both the kids in drama lessons or the kids with no lessons." - Cognitive Daily (June 2005)
"It's no secret that exercise improves mood, but new research suggests that working out to music may give exercisers a cognitive boost. Listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients." - Science Daily (March 2004)
"According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the training, the better the verbal memory." - Science Daily (July 2003)
"Mayo Clinic researchers found that healthy, older adults who participated in a computer-based training program to improve the speed and accuracy of brain processing showed twice the improvement in certain aspects of memory, compared to a control group." - Science Daily (Feb 2009)
Plastic Brain Outsmarts Experts: Training Can Increase Fluid Intelligence, Once Thought To Be Fixed At Birth - Science Daily (June 2008)
"Amazingly, students predicted little or no learning improvement would occur with repeated study sessions, yet they actually showed large increases in actual learning with repeated study" - Psycholodgy Today Blog (April 2010)
"There is growing evidence that playing action video games increases people's ability to process visual information quickly and to make decisions based on that information." - Psycholodgy Today Blog (Jan 2010)
"How video games are good for the brain. Concerns about violent programs persist, but researchers are discovering that playing can boost cognitive function and foster positive behavior" - The Boston Globe (Oct 2009)
"Mayo Clinic researchers found that healthy, older adults who participated in a computer-based training program to improve the speed and accuracy of brain processing showed twice the improvement in certain aspects of memory, compared to a control group." - Science Daily (Feb 2009)
"A new study of people in their 60s and 70s has found that playing a strategy video game focused on conquering the world appears to improve some of the cognitive skills that naturally decline during aging." - The Dana Foundation (Feb 2009)
Practice Spread Out Over Months and Years
"Probing the longevity of knowledge, Bahrick tested 1,000 high school graduates to see how well they recalled their algebra. Some had completed the course as recently as a month before, others as long as 50 years earlier. He also determined how long each person had studied algebra, the grade received, and how much the skill was used over the course of adulthood."
"Surprisingly, a person's grasp of algebra at the time of testing did not depend on how long ago he'd taken the course--the determining factor was the duration of instruction. Those who had spent only a few months learning algebra forgot most of it within two or three years."
"In another study, Bahrick discovered that people who had taken several courses in Spanish, spread out over a couple of years, could recall, decades later, 60 percent or more of the vocabulary they learned. Those who took just one course retained only a trace after three years."
""This long-term residue of knowledge remains stable over the decades, independent of the age of the person and the age of the memory. No serious deficit appears until people get to their 50s and 60s, probably due to the degenerative processes of aging rather than a cognitive loss.""
"If you're 30 and want to learn to play the piano, you'd be better off taking one lesson a week for a year than two weekly lessons for six months. And, instead of practicing for seven hours on Sunday afternoons, practice one hour every day.""
"Adaptive training is a strategic form of study that ensures the learner spends more time focused on material they know less well and less time focused on already mastered material. This means that less familiar material is re-examined more frequently, while better mastered material is gradually left for longer and longer periods." - BPS Research (July 2009)
Neurofeedback
Researchers Find Link Between Improved Memory And The Use Of Neurofeedback - Science Daily (Jan 2003)
"When scientists began to study expertise, they first assumed that experts must be smarter or more talented than novices, but they quickly learned that the key difference between experts and novices is not mental power, but knowledge. Cognitive psychologists Michelene Chi, Marshall Farr, and Robert Glaser have defined an expert as somebody who has a great deal of highly organized domain-specific knowledge, where a domain is a network of knowledge, such as chess, mathematics, or music. For experts, knowledge has morphed from many pieces into a unified whole." - Psychology Today Blogs (Jan 2009)
"Children who had the best average scores in standardized tests in reading, math, science and social studies were fit at the start and end of the study, researchers found. The next best group, academically, in all four subjects, was made up of children who were not fit in fifth grade but had become fit by seventh grade. The children who had lost their fitness levels between fifth and seventh grades were third in academic performance. Children who were not physically fit in either the fifth or seventh grades had the lowest academic performance." - 
