Author: DynamicBrain Inc.
Publication: Monthly Newsletter
Published Date: January 18, 2020

Happy healthy and peaceful 2020!

In this year’s resolution list, we hope that your “health” plan includes brain health too. And if you are wondering why most people don’t keep up with their new year resolutions, Dr. Merzenich has explained it well: In order to sustain anything in our activity list, we need a strong captain on our ship, and we need to focus on the positive and ignore negative distractors. Here is Dr. Merzenich’s 3-minute podcast which is worth listening to.

If you are not yet a BrainHQ regular user, you can try a few exercises here (scroll down) and, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Kind regards, Frieda Fanni President DynamicBrain Inc. DynamicBrain Inc. is the Canadian partner of Posit Science Corporation providing brain fitness program BrainHQ in English and French.

Brain pressure and glaucoma
Did you know that glaucoma is the leading cause of blindness for people over 60? Glaucoma is caused by increased pressure in the eye. Until now, it hasn’t been clear how brain pressure affects eye pressure. For the first time, research shows that eye and brain pressure are physiologically connected and that there is a feedback pathway from the brain to the eye that controls eye pressure. Find out how this discovery offers a new area for potential glaucoma diagnosis and treatment here.

New insights into Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder, meaning that parts of the brain “die” and can’t be replaced. For many years, research into Alzheimer’s has focused on the nervous system. Recently, scientists have found that the immune system plays a role in how Alzheimer’s progresses. New research shows that certain immune cells in the cerebrospinal fluid may be involved. See how this research contributes to our understanding of the immune system and neurodegenerative disorders here.

Babies on the brain
It’s hard enough getting adult participants to sit still and take part in an experiment – just imagine if all your participants were under the age of two! Researchers at Princeton University found that when babies and adult play together, their brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys. The strongest signs of this occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which was previously thought to be underdeveloped during infancy. Interestingly, they found that the babies’ brains were often ‘leading’ the adult brains by a few seconds, which could show that they were guiding adults toward the next thing they are going to focus on. Learn more about how adults embrace their inner child here.