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Why can’t we read anymore?
Spending time with friends, or family, I often feel a soul-deep throb coming from that perfectly engineered wafer of stainless steel and glass and rare earth metals in my pocket. Touch me. Look at me. This sickness is not limited to when I am trying to read, or once-in-a-lifetime events with my daughter. At work, my concentration is constantly broken: finishing writing an article (this one, actually), answering that client’s request, reviewing and commenting on the new designs, cleaning up the copy on the About page. All these tasks critical to my livelihood, get bumped more often than I should admit by a quick look at Twitter (for work), or Facebook (also for work), or an article about Mandelbrot sets (which, just this minute, I read). Dopamine and digital It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. How can books compete?
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The Nightmare Is Over: Researchers Discover the Switch for REM Sleep
University of California scientists have found a powerful on-off "switch" that sends dozing mice into a full-fledged, eye-twitching, cheese-chasing mousy dreamworld. Sleep is one of those funny things about being a human being -- you just have to do it. Have you ever wondered why? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the importance of sleep. That "switch" seems to be a particular group of neurons in the brain that, when stimulated in sleeping mice, immediately pushes the rodents into REM sleep. "It was already known for many decades, the neurons necessary for REM sleep. There are other regions in the brain that relate to REM sleep. But what Weber, lead author Yang Dan and their team showed was that the region and the group of neurons they were exploring were not just "into" that part of REM. When they flipped their "switch" — done by an optical device that triggered certain neurons — 94 percent of the test mice fell deeply into REM sleep almost immediately.
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Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving
Editor's note: This post is co-authored by Marcus Conyers who, with Donna Wilson, is co-developer of the M.S. and Ed.S. Brain-Based Teaching degree programs at Nova Southeastern University. They have written several books, including Five Big Ideas for Effective Teaching: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Education Research to Classroom Practice. Students who succeed academically often rely on being able to think effectively and independently in order to take charge of their learning. These students have mastered fundamental but crucial skills such as keeping their workspace organized, completing tasks on schedule, making a plan for learning, monitoring their learning path, and recognizing when it might be useful to change course. They do not need to rely on their teacher as much as others who depend on more guidance to initiate learning tasks and monitor their progress. Metacognition in the Brain How to Teach Students to Be More Metacognitive Reference Stephen M. For Further Reading
PowerPoint Jeopardy Templates Downloads, Educational PowerPoint Information
Why should I use PowerPoint in my Classroom Today's students need a diversity of experiences in the classroom. PowerPoint activities used in moderation can help provide that diversity. When teachers first started using PowerPoint in the classroom, some of them went overboard and used PowerPoint as part of every lecture or every activity on a daily basis. Using classroom PowerPoints in this way can lead to student boredom. Teachers need to look at PowerPoint as more than digital "lecture notes" and instead look at new ways they can use this classroom technology to enhance student learning. Ideas for using PowerPoint in the Classroom Bell Ringers and Exit Slip Activities Daily classroom content Check the software that came with your textbooks. Pre-created PowerPoint Jeopardy Downloads Additional Sites with Pre-created PowerPoint Activities and Jeopardy Templates
How stress affects your brain - Madhumita Murgia
To learn about some of the most seminal experiments that show how stress changes your brain, read this interesting story in Psychology Today. This interactive explains how mom rats impact the adult personalities of their pups, based on how much they lick them. You get to be a rat mom yourself, to see how you've changed your pup's genes! Watch this TED Talk about how we are thinking about stress all wrong: believing stress is bad for you may actually be worse than the stress itself! This cool Radiolab podcast explores the science of stress, including coping strategies seen all around the animal kingdom.
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Why Identity and Emotion are Central To Motivating the Teen Brain
By Emmeline Zhao For years, common experience and studies have prescribed that humans learn best in their earliest years of life – when the brain is developing at its fastest. Recently, though, research has suggested that the period of optimal learning extends well into adolescence. The flurry of new findings may force a total rethinking of how educators and parents nurture this vulnerable age group, turning moments of frustration into previously unseen opportunities for learning and academic excitement. New evidence shows that the window for formative brain development continues into the onset of puberty, between ages 9 and 13, and likely through the teenage years, according to Ronald Dahl, professor of community health and human development at the University of California, Berkeley. Dahl spoke at a recent Education Writers Association seminar on motivation and engagement. “Adolescence is a perfect storm of opportunities to align these changes in positive ways,” Dahl said.
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Antidepressant with novel action appears safe and effective in phase 1b clinical trial
A small clinical trial of a novel antidepressant that stimulates neurogenesis - the production of new brain cells - shows that the compound appears to be safe and may be effective against depression. Results of the phase 1B trial, led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators, show that treatment with the drug currently identified as NSI-189 improved both depressive and cognitive symptoms in study participants and that its effects appear to persist for several months after treatment discontinuation. The study was supported by the pharmaceutical company Neuralstem. "All currently approved antidepressant drugs modulate changes in the levels of monoamine neurotransmitters," says Maurizio Fava, MD, executive director of the Clinical Trials Network & Institute (CTNI) in the MGH Department of Psychiatry, lead author of the study published online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Explore further: FDA approves new drug for schizophrenia, major depression
