Brain Health Blog

Category Archives: Brain Research

The Science Behind Lumosity

Lumosity users and research collaborators often ask us for more information on the science that goes into the games and training applications on the site. To help make this info more accessible, we have just published The Science Behind Lumosity.
This document describes the background brain science, the principles upon which the brain games and courses were [...]

Targeted Cognitive Exercises Improve Mental Abilities

Training with cognitive exercises can improve targeted mental functions, conclude the authors of a review article published recently in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.  The authors (Kathryn Papp and Stephen Walsh from the University of Connecticut and Peter Snyder from Brown University) reviewed ten randomized controlled trials involving cognitive training interventions in healthy adults published [...]

Intelligence Training Comes to Lumosity

Can you actually become more intelligent?  For years, neuroscientists thought that this basically didn’t happen.  According to this view, you can take in more information and learn new things, but you can’t really become “more intelligent.”  Recent research conducted by scientists at the University of Michigan shows that this old view [...]

Eating fish may reduce risk of stroke

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.
Eating lots of fish, the ultimate brain food, was recently associated with reduced risk of stroke.
A study conducted by Jyrki Virtanen and his crew at the University of Kuopio in Finland found that people who ate more fish tended [...]

Working memory training changes the brain

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and science writer for Lumos Labs .
It seems that working memory training may work by physically altering the brain. Stockholm Brain Institute researchers put healthy people through working memory exercises for 35 minutes per day over a period of 5 weeks. Changes in dopamine receptor density [...]

Trying too hard to focus

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and science writer for Lumos Labs .
A new study indicates that focusing too much might actually diminish your ability to pay attention. The researchers, based out of Carnegie Mellon University, used a phenomenon called the attentional blink as the center of their investigation.
An attentional [...]

Brain Imaging Study Supports the “Cognitive Reserve” Hypothesis

Individuals with higher education levels appear to score higher on cognitive tests despite having evidence of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Newswise— Individuals with higher education levels appear to score higher on cognitive tests despite having evidence of [...]

Smoking and the Brain

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.
A recent research review to be published in the journal Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry shows a link between cigarette smoking and adverse changes in the function and physiology of the brain. Summarizing the findings of dozens [...]