My daughter linked this finding to me last night: World of Warcraft Improves Cognitive Ability for Older Adults.  I couldn’t reconstruct the original link, but google pulled up an aggregated feed of a lot of places reporting on this result: http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_m9/game-study-cognitive.html The source lab looks to be doing some interesting stuff: http://www.gainsthroughgaming.org/index.html The published report […]

Kati sent a link to a piece in the New Yorker on Anti-Aging games: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/01/30/120130ta_talk_seabrook Fountain of Youth Dept. Re-Start by John Seabrook January 30, 2012 Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling […]

Here’s an interesting NY Times Opinion piece on some bill going forward that would stop NIH from requiring grantees to provide copies of their papers. Tax dollars funding our research is especially touchy in the given economy, so it seems like this would be another bit of negative news to the researchers just wanting to […]

An email from my friend Jon Simons at Cambridge: Please excuse the spam, but I’d be very grateful if people would be kind enough to spread the word to their students and colleagues about an online memory experiment we’ve launched this week in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper.  We’re hoping that thousands of people from […]

That’s the advice from a blogger/writer who has been studying and writing about how to achieve excellence.  It’s mainly advice passed on from an expert piano player, but it has a certain intuitive appeal to it. http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/23/flow-is-the-opiate-of-the-medicore-advice-on-getting-better-from-an-accomplished-piano-player/ I think the idea comes from the perspective of “deliberate practice” and the idea that practicing that which […]

This is cool, but I have to say I’m also a little sad that I didn’t write this… How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/01/how-a-computer-game-is-reinventing-the-science-of-expertise-video/ There’s also some discussion of Starcraft as brain training to boot.

These guys are building the social networking/gaming environment that would be idea for embedding cognitive training http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/11/glitch-the-battle-to-build-a-massive-multiplayer-game-without-combat.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies […]

An interesting article came out on the TIME website today, haven’t looked at the actual paper, but seems like a good read. Study: Autistic Children Have More Brain Cells

This seems like a pretty interesting bit of research that suggests that stem cells might actually be applicable to treatment at some point. Dopamine neurons derived from human ES cells efficiently engraft in animal models of Parkinson’s disease The real question is, will this eventually destroy potential funding or need for Parkinson’s research? It’s funny […]

A new paradigm for studying expertise?  Osu! is a free rhythm game that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard.  It’s pretty hard, but some people get pretty good at it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mCAE6nzB6LI#t=526s The game itself is available here: http://osu.ppy.sh/ It has potential value for introspection during skill learning, I think.  If you practice a specific […]