Tuesday, 15 March 2022
Exercising in childhood appears to have positive effects throughout life
In the northern hemisphere, spring and summer are finally approaching, and I advise everyone who lives here to take advantage of the increased opportunities to get out in nature for their exercise. Because if there’s one thing that’s been very well established scientifically, it’s that physical exercise has positive effects on all of our bodily functions, including the cognitive ones. I’ve posted about this topic here for example in 2017, so today I’ll keep up the tradition and tell you about a recent study by Toru Ishihara and his team at Kobe University in Japan, about how childhood exercise can maintain and promote cognitive function in later life. (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed
Monday, 28 February 2022
Mindfulness meditation at school improves sustained attention and cognitive control
Many young people have trouble in focussing on tasks to complete them successfully. Scientists have shown that the mere presence of your cell phone within easy reach can affect your cognitive abilities, which may be part of the reason for attention problems among today’s youth. But the human brain, and especially the young human brain, is highly plastic. And a study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping in September 2020 seems to have proved it once again, by showing that 8 weeks of training in mindfulness meditation improves sustained attention and cognitive control among Grade 6 students. (more…)
The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
Tuesday, 4 January 2022
The dark side of the scientific-publications business
Today’s post was inspired by an online course about the process and the business of publishing scientific articles. Presented in French by Julie Augustin, a doctoral student in the Department of Biological Science at the Université de Montréal, in March 2021, this course is now available as two 1-hour YouTube videos. The first, La publication scientifique, qu’est-ce que c’est ?, discusses how researchers prepare scientific articles, how these articles are reviewed by the researchers’ peers, and how they are published in scientific journals. Most people who aren’t scientists themselves don’t know much about these processes, but nowadays, when many of us are basing critical health decisions on discussions of such articles in the media, it’s good to learn more about how these articles get produced. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
