Tag archive: brain

A report last week suggested that to ward off brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, constant cerebral stimulation through activities like games and reading could be the key. And one woman, 100-year-old Kathleen Connell, would certainly appear to back up such findings, with the centenarian putting her longevity and sharp mind almost entirely down to her Nintendo DS gaming device. Kathleen, who jokingly says she doesn’t feel a day over 80, clearly… Read More

Ever wondered what’s going on inside that space between your ears? Well, wonder no more – an app that scans your brain and monitors its electrical activity has been created by Jakob Eg Larsen and his team at the Technical University of Denmark. At present it works on the Nokia N900 smartphone and requires only a small, commercially available electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, making it portable enough to monitor neural signals while at… Read More

The structure of the human brain is perhaps, still, one of science’s greatest mysteries. As discovery paves the way through the human genome (our six billion basepairs of DNA) and human proteome (our vast array of proteins), one of the greatest remaining questions has been, “How do the neurons in our brain connect?” That mapping has been termed the connectome. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research have utilized two newly… Read More

You’ve undoubtedly seen the ads for brain training games for portable games consoles. A group of experts put together by the consumer magazine Which?, and including eminent neuroscientists, discovered no scientific evidence to support a range of manufacturers' claims that the games improve memory or can lower the risk of illnesses such as dementia. Instead, they said, doing a crossword or even surfing online could achieve the… Read More

Nintendo might be garnering all sorts of attention for the success of its Wii console, but lets not forget it has another best-selling system on its hands in the form of the Nintendo DS handheld gaming system. Now, the company is hoping to expand the system's appeal to non-traditional gamers by offering a new fashion-friendly crimson-and-black edition of the Nintendo DS Lite, bundled with the latest installment of its mental… Read More

One of the reasons the Nintendo Wii has proven so popular is that it appeals to non-traditional gamers, including children, senior citizens, and casual gamers who aren't interested in investing 50+ hours navigating through gore-drenched levels of first-person shooters. Now, Nintendo is bringing on of its most popular casual gaming franchises to the Wii with Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. “With Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree,… Read More

Nintendo introduced the Nintendo DS handheld gaming system on November 21, 2004, and today the company announced that it has sold more than 21 million of the diminutive handheld gaming devices. Averaged out over time, that's almost one unit every two seconds since the product was launched. “We're thrilled to be announcing this milestone today,” says GeorgeHarrison, Nintendo of America's senior vice president… Read More

A new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may offer some insight on how the brain organizes information for navigating the real world. It's long been believed that sleep deprivation impacts individuals' ability to consolidate and integrate memories from a memory one must explicitly recall to a memory which is completely integrated, or automatic. Think of when you're traveling, or move to a… Read More

Nintendo today said they were rolling out a new game for their DS portable gaming platform which is designed to provide fun mental workouts which incorporate the gaming device's voice-command and touch-screen capabilities. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day is available now. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, said Nintendo, is the American version of Japanese title which has already sold over two million units. It… Read More

Anyone remember the first weeks of 1986? That's when a boot-sector floppy-based PC virus called Brain started turning up in the wild. Brain was written by two Pakistani brothers as a copy protection scheme for medical software they were developing. Compared to viruses today, Brain was a weakling: for one thing, it only spread via floppy disks: these were the days before widespread access to the Internet. And, unlike most viruses today,… Read More

Quote from the article: “Most of us don't think much about the images we look at on a TV, flat-panel display, or on a laptop or desktop computer screen; that is, we don't think about what comprises the image