Imagine a boy sitting in front of a computer screen, controlling what appears on the monitor with only his brainwaves. His hands don't move; he makes no sound. But as he watches the screen, his brain learns to regulate itself in response to visual feedback from the computer. With practice, in about 20 one-hour sessions, his focus improves, his grades go up, and his social interactions become more positive and relaxed.

I woke up in a cheerful mood this morning because yesterday the results of a scientific study were published and they once again demonstrated that very strong benefits can be achieved through only 10 hours of Posit Science brain training. The cognitive benefits were not just seen in the tasks themselves, but in measures of everyday activities. What’s more, the benefits lasted for at least a year after training. The study found that the more people trained, the better their level of cognitive protection.

Forget baseball, it turns out that watching TV is America's true national pastime. According to the 2007 findings of the American Time Use Survey, recently released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American men and women spend about half of their free time watching television. And, although this particular survey only included adults, more and more research suggests that our nation's children are following in their parents footsteps.

Echoing Mozart: Discovering a Link between the Brain and Music
When Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher published the results of their study on the relationship between music and spatial task performance in 1993, the "Mozart effect" became a popular term. It referred to the study's findings that ten minutes of listening to Mozart can boost one's spatial-temporal intelligence. But why Mozart? According to Marion Diamond, who describes the inception of Shaw's hypothesis in her book, Magic Trees of the Mind, the idea began when Shaw attended a lecture on how the brain transmits neural messages.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of times a year a young athlete takes a hard blow to the head in the course of a high school, college, or an amateur sporting event. When this occurs, how do trainers and coaches determine if the athlete has received a concussion? If he or she has a concussion, is it cause for concern? And how is a decision made to return an athlete to playing contact sports? Over the past several years, a number of studies have shown that many different factors need to be considered in assessing sports-related concussions at all levels, from young children involved in Little League to professional athletes.