Data on over 3,000 people shows only 8 percent with low-quality diets maintained high cognitive abilities into their 70s, a new study reveals.
Smart Glasses for Older Adults With Cognitive Impairment: A Scoping Review
This study aimed to identify and synthesize peer-reviewed literature on smart glasses for older adults with cognitive impairment. The review focused on (1) the technology and equipment used, (2) the specific tasks smart glasses are designed to support, (3) feasibility outcomes, when measured, and (4) the quality of the reviewed articles.
Generative artificial intelligence reliance and executive function attenuation: Behavioral evidence of cognitive offload in high-use adults.
How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon Essays
ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information
How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon Essays
ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.
Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.
AI Use Appears to Have a "Boiling Frog" Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns
A new study claims to offer the first causal link between AI dependency and cognitive erosion. Researchers warn of long-term implications.
Opinion | There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate
Just as we changed our thinking around physical fitness, we need to change our attitude toward cognitive fitness.
From gifted to high potential and twice exceptional: A state-of-the-art meta-review
Despite the abundant literature on intelligence and high potential individuals, there is still a lack of international consensus on the terminology and clinical characteristics associated to this population. It has been argued that unstandardized use of diagnosis tools and research methods make comparisons and interpretations of scientific and epidemiological evidence difficult in this field. If multiple cognitive and psychological models have attempted to explain the mechanisms underlying high potentiality, there is a need to confront new scientific evidence with the old, to uproot a global understanding of what constitutes the neurocognitive profile of high-potential in gifted individuals. Another particularly relevant aspect of applied research on high potentiality concerns the challenges faced by individuals referred to as "twice exceptional" in the field of education and in their socio-affective life. Some individuals have demonstrated high forms of intelligence together with learning, affective or neurodevelopmental disorders posing the question as to whether compensating or exacerbating psycho-cognitive mechanisms might underlie their observed behavior. Elucidating same will prove relevant to questions concerning the possible need for differential diagnosis tools, specialized educational and clinical support. A meta-review of the latest findings from neuroscience to developmental psychology, might help in the conception and reviewing of intervention strategies.
Can Alzheimer’s really be reversed, as a new documentary claims?
A CNN documentary follows two people with Alzheimer’s who took part in a study to determine if lifestyle changes can reverse symptoms.
The Effect of Partitions on Controlling Consumption
The authors demonstrate that partitioning an aggregate quantity of a resource (e.g., food, money) into smaller units reduces the consumed quantity or the rate of consumption of that resource. Partitions draw attention to the consumption decision by introducing a small transaction cost; that is, they provide more decision-making opportunities so that prudent consumers can control consumption. Thus, people are better able to constrain consumption when resources associated with a desirable activity (which they are trying to control) are partitioned rather than when they are aggregated. This effect of partitioning is demonstrated for the consumption of chocolates (Study 1) and gambles (Study 2). In Study 3, process measures reveal that partitioning increases recall accuracy and decision times. Importantly, the effect of partitioning diminishes when consumers are not trying to regulate consumption (Studies 1 and 3). Finally, Study 4 explores how habituation may decrease the amount of attention that partitions draw to consumption. In this context, partitions control consumption to a greater extent when the nature of partitions changes frequently.
High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities
High intelligence is touted as being predictive of positive outcomes including educational success and income level. However, little is known about the difficulties experienced among this population. Specifically, those with a high intellectual capacity (hyper brain) possess overexcitabilities in various domains that may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory, and altered immune and inflammatory responses (hyper body). The present study surveyed members of American Mensa, Ltd. (n=3715) in order to explore psychoneuroimmunological (PNI) processes among those at or above the 98th percentile of intelligence. Participants were asked to self-report prevalence of both diagnosed and/or suspected mood and anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and physiological diseases that include environmental and food allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disease. High statistical significance and a remarkably high relative risk ratio of diagnoses for all examined conditions were confirmed among the Mensa group 2015 data when compared to the national average statistics. This implicates high IQ as being a potential risk factor for affective disorders, ADHD, ASD, and for increased incidence of disease related to immune dysregulation. Preliminary findings strongly support a hyper brain/hyper body association which may have substantial individual and societal implications and warrants further investigation to best identify and serve this at-risk population.
Overnight olfactory enrichment using an odorant diffuser improves memory and modifies the uncinate fasciculus in older adults
Objective: Cognitive loss in older adults is a growing issue in our society, and there is a need to develop inexpensive, simple, effective in-home treatments. This study was conducted to explore the use of olfactory enrichment at night to improve cognitive ability in healthy older adults.Methods: Male and female older adults (N=43), age 60-85, were enrolled in the study and randomly assigned to an Olfactory Enriched or Control group. Individuals in the enriched group were exposed to 7 different odorants a week, one per night, for 2 hours, using an odorant diffuser. Individuals in the control group had the same experience with de minimis amounts of odorant. Neuropsychological assessments and fMRI scans were administered at the beginning of the study and after 6 months.Results: A statistically significant improvement was observed in the enriched group compared to the control group on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and improved functioning was observed in the left uncinate fasciculus, as assessed by mean diffusivity.Minimal olfactory enrichment administered at night produces improvements in both cognitive and neural functioning. Thus, olfactory enrichment may provide an effective and low-effort pathway to improved brain health.
The Terrorist in the Brain
What can Robin Williams and Bruce Willis teach us about dementia? This article explores the complex biological realities of brain diseases, controversies in Alzheimer's research, the risks of new drugs, and the multi-billion-dollar industry exploiting our fear of cognitive decline.
ADHD and giftedness: a neurocognitive consideration of twice exceptionality
Current models of cognition and behavioral diagnosis emphasize categorical classification over continuous considerations of function and promote the "differential diagnosis" of various conditions according to observational criteria. However, an overemphasis on a purely behavioral, categorical approach to understanding human function fails to address the comorbidity of different disorders and does not include a consideration of overlapping levels of function, from "pathological" through "normal," to "gifted" or exceptional. The frequent co-occurrence of "gifted" and "pathological" function is thus difficult to understand from a corticocentric and purely behavioral and observational point of view. This article reviews "giftedness" in relation to the diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, coexistence of which is termed "twice exceptional." It additionally considers problems in assessing these functions using current neuropsychological tests and methodologies that are presumably based upon a corticocentric model of cognition.
The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints
Your Brain on MIT Media Lab
