On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. 
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This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.“ Chemofog ” is REAL!!
The New York Times has just informed us all, in an April 29 article, that “Chemotherapy Fog is No Longer… an Illusion”. It’s official now, all you cancer survivors! The Voice of Authority has spoken! (Here’s the full article.)
As if you didn’t already know.
Seriously, the NY Times article did make the important points that the level of impairment attributable to chemotherapy is a) substantially variable; b) is severe and lasts forever, in about a fifth of treated individuals; c) is greater in patients who undergo heavier chemotherapy regimes; and d) may be amplified by prophylactic drugs...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - February 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Science BrainHQ Posit Science Source Type: blogs
Was that Will really Free?
Not Shakespeare, mind you. We’re talking about the infamous Mr. Seung-Hui Cho. Stephanie noted in a comment that Sharon Begley had written very cogently (and generally in agreement with what I had written) about the origins of behavior that could result in something like the Virginia Tech massacre. Sharon Begley is a highly informed science writer who really understands the basic science of brain plasticity, and as a Wall Street Journal writer, has helped introduce the wider world to its principles. She is now directing the science writing agenda for Newsweek, and is publishing a new, important blog that you would pr...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - January 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Posit Science Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs
Jack ’ s hippocampus is bigger than yours
My dog Jack, thinking, has a proportionally larger hippocampus than you do. If I had a pet bunny, its hippocampus would be (proportionally) larger, still!! You’ve probably heard a lot about the crucial role that the hippocampus plays in recording our “episodic” (historic, serial, ‘long-term’) memories. Does this mean that we should revise that age old saying to “Molly has a memory like a… rabbit!” Or what?! Or put another way, what can a rabbit or dog DO, that is decisively superior to YOU?
It turns out that dogs and especially rabbits have an exquisite ability to reconstruct...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - December 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et ali Source Type: blogs
Ultrasound and autism
A former UCSF medical student, Carolyn Rees, now a doc in rural Idaho, wrote me a very informative letter — and raised several interesting questions — that are definitely worth a little discussion here.
Dr. Rees asked: Is there any evidence that ultrasound examination can affect brain development?
In fact, that evidence is mixed. Over the past 15-25 years, a number of smaller studies conducted principally in North America recorded cognitive and language impairments in children that were attributable to ultrasound examination — while results in several other subsequent large studies conducted principally i...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - November 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness BrainHQ Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs
A ‘ smarter ’ Mike
I again completed Posit Science’s “BrainHQ”, about a week ago, and have been alert to possible changes that I might be able to attribute to it. Two stand out. I have been writing another book, and had written a chapter in which the reader surveys their neurological status by conducting a series of simple, self-administered assessments. As I worked on the development of these tasks, I “invented” a speech fluency assessment, and as a part of that development measured my own abilities. Because I perceived gains in speech fluency after BrainHQ training, I re-tested myself. Overall fluency scores h...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - October 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Source Type: blogs
What underlies the documented increase in autism incidence? Results of a new study
Studies from the Center for Disease Control and elsewhere have compellingly documented a rapid increase in the incidence of autism in the United States. WHAT THE HELL IS CAUSING IT? Given the enormous human and societal costs of this malady, few practical scientific questions are more important to we Americans, in our current era.
Whether a single or multiple factors, the cause(s) of an increased incidence of autism has to meet three obvious criteria:
It has to be widely dispersed in our environment — because autism rate increases are EVERYWHERE, at least in the United States.
It must be steadily increasing in its c...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - September 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs
Computers go to school
The U.S. Department of Education recently published a report that they prepared for Congress summarizing the gains achieved by children using computer-based training in reading and mathematics, comparing randomly assigned classes of children who did or did not use these tools (“Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort”; Report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences). If you read this report you would discover, perhaps surprisingly, that th...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - August 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Language Development Posit Science Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs
Why we do research
Why do we study autistic or dyslexic or schizophrenic or other subjects, in our scientific experiments? That is a question that was asked, rather impolitely, by “dyslexic in LA”, who challenged the “arrogance” of a perspective that engages such individuals as “scientific guinea pigs”. There are two simple answers to this question.
We want to understand.
If possible, we want to help.
There are few if any individuals in the current era who have contributed more to understanding and helping autistic individuals than Tito, Soma, and Portia. I’ve tried to help them. I have the GREATES...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - July 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et ali Source Type: blogs
The brain and the law, when Bobby goes bad
Each year I deliver a “guest lecture” in a medical ethics course at Stanford. My friend Bill Hurlbut, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, is the course director. The issues that I raise in this course were addressed in part by an interesting cover story in the March 11th New York Times Sunday magazine (“The Brain on the Stand”), which considered some of the ways that contemporary neuroscience could be used in our legal system to neurologically determine truth from falsehood, or guilt from innocence. The article stated, quite correctly, that it should soon be possible to reconstru...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - June 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs
Another factor contributing to PTSD onset; the NUMBER of traumatic events
A scientific friend and colleague, Professor Thomas Elbert from Konstanz University in Germany, has had a long interest in applying “simple” treatments to individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs). With his wife Maggie and others, he has developed and applied such treatments to war victims, primarily in Africa and Sri Lanka. There, literally millions of individuals have endured great personal losses and multiple horrifying experiences. If and when these individuals are resettled back to their homes in Uganda or Liberia or Sierra Leone or Rwanda or Sudan or the Congo Republic or wherever...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - May 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs
How can the same brain plasticity-based training programs help individuals with cognitive losses arising from normal aging, exposure to IED explosions, or chemotherapy?
Over the years, I have specifically discussed the potential value of intensive brain plasticity-based brain fitness training for individuals with ALL of these (and other, related) personal histories. How in the heck can “one size fit all”? How on earth can the losses in mental faculties stemming from an explosion of little bubbles in the brain accompanying an IED blast be related to those derived from a slow, deliberate chemical poisoning of regenerative processes in the brain designed to limit the proliferation of cancerous tissues that are usually not even IN the brain, or to the normal deterioration of the f...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - April 12, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Source Type: blogs
Why science can be confusing, just another example
This study DOES provide unequivocal evidence that new cell formation in the hippocampus is not REQUIRED for spatial learning. That is hardly surprising. The primary changes underlying learning involve an amplification of the strengths of just those connections (synapses) that contribute to a successful learning outcome. In most of the brain — including the cerebral cortex and the primary brain centers that support the cortex’s contributions to learning, cognition and memory control — there is little or no neurogenesis in adult brains. Nonetheless, the brain is, by its very nature, a plastic (LEARNING) mac...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - February 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Source Type: blogs
Second-language learning as brain exercise
While I was working in Mexico, my wife Diane spends much of each day in an immersion Spanish class. She began by taking Spanish classes at a local community center. Now that she has the basics, an immersion class in which you have to operate in the second language is pretty effective. After two weeks of classes, the difference is striking; she now has the confidence for operating in simple, everyday conversations in social child-talk Spanish. She is determine to grow an oak tree from this acorn!
There are few things that you can do that are better for an older brain than taking on a complex new challenge like this one. Lea...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - January 1, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Cognitive impairments Language Development Posit Science Source Type: blogs
“ What ’ s Normal? ” The diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children is on the rise
In an article in an issue of the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman writes lucidly about the explosion in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children. Reading it made me thank my lucky stars once again that I am not a child neurologist or child psychologist or child psychiatrist who actually has to address the problems presented by the instable child personality, one child at a time. As in the case of the ADHD “epidemic” that has resulted in the continuous medication of hundreds of thousands of children with strong neuro-active drugs, a rapidly growing population of kids are now being given even more powerful anti-p...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - December 1, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs
Alvaro asked a tough question: How do you define SMART?
Alvaro asked this question as a comment after a blog entry discussed recent evidence that physical exercise contributes to academic success. Alvaro, “smart”, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. You do not necessarily want a computer jockey next to you in your foxhole. You do not necessarily want a great world scholar managing your finances. If I lifted you up and dropped you down into a community of Aleuts or Bedouins or Ainu, it would take a very, very long time before anyone in that community viewed you as “smart”. “SMART” IS CONTEXTUAL.
We commonly define “smart” ...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - November 1, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness Brain Science Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Neuroscience Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs
