Study Shows Brain Gene Activity Changes Throughout Life

By charting the brain’s genetic activity from before birth to old age, studies reveal that the brain continually remodels itself in predictable ways throughout life. In addition to uncovering details of how the brain grows and ages, the results may help scientists better understand what goes awry in brain disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. What’s more, the differences in gene behavior between male and female brains were greatest at early stages of development.

Read more here.

Sharing my Insights on the East and West Coast this Week

Pivot Conference 2011

Earlier this week I spoke at the Pivot Conference in New York. It was an engaging and enlightening event and I enjoyed speaking with others about the trends we are seeing. Pivot is the only conference focused purely on how major brands, agencies, marketers and content creators can succeed by understanding, accessing and influencing the emerging Social Consumer. You can find a summary of my talking points here.
Here are some of my quotes that were posted to the #pivotcono Twitter feed throughout the conference:
“You can create an education system that is addictive by creating a multisensory game system”
“The brain is hardwired to never ever ignore motion”
“There’s no problem that can’t be solved by innovation and entrepreneurship”
“Entrepreneurship is about seeing a problem, finding a solution and executing it. It’s a “state of mind.”

Tomorrow, I am discussing the role of Neuroscience on reinventing education at SVForum Education and Technology Conference in Palo Alto.

Click here for a preview.

Research Reveals a Genetic Link To Human Intelligence

University of Manchester scientists, working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Australia, have provided the first direct biological evidence for a genetic contribution to people’s intelligence. The team studied two types of intelligence in more than 3,500 people from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Manchester. The paper, by Dr Neil Pendleton and colleagues, found that 40% to 50% of people’s differences in these abilities could be traced to genetic differences

Researchers Change Brain Cells into Heart Cells

For the past decade, researchers have tried to reprogram the identity of all kinds of cell types. Heart cells are one of the most sought-after cells in regenerative medicine because researchers anticipate that they may help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue. Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the first to demonstrate the direct conversion of a non-heart cell type into a heart cell by RNA transfer. For the past decade, researchers have tried to reprogram the identity of all kinds of cell types. Heart cells are one of the most sought-after cells in regenerative medicine because researchers anticipate that they may help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue. Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the first to demonstrate the direct conversion of a non-heart cell type into a heart cell by RNA transfer. Read more here

Neuroscience: Can we use it to Create Better Learners?

The field of education is contentious and resistant to innovation or change. There seems to be a growing sense that the problems that education systems face is just too difficult and multifaceted to fix. Most importantly, the focus is on how to “fix education infrastructure” (improve teachers, reduce class size, improve curriculum, develop alternative school models, etc.) rather than to “build better learners” by enhancing each child’s neural capacities and motivation for life-long learning.

Less than two decades ago the concept that you could improve educational outcomes by increasing each person’s neural capacities for learning would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy (and hence learning capacity) was fixed at birth. It is commonly believed that children enter school with differing (genetically endowed) brain capacities and that teachers must just make-do with these individual differences in learning capacity. Recent breakthroughs in the neuroscience of learning have demonstrated that this view is fundamentally wrong.

Read more in my full-length Forbes Blog.

Researchers Can Predict Future Actions From Brain Activity

Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers at The University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. Read more here