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the New Science of Building Brain Power
Sep 02, 2016callig rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
If you're not quite up to ploughing through a 250 page book to find out what the consensus is re brain boosting software [& hardware] you should read the July [August?] issue of Discover magazine, wherein he covers the same material [and plugs this book]. Bottom line? There isn't one- the academic community is engaged in one huge cat fight over this issue. Even Hurley makes a weak and vague concluding remark- "Well, i feel smarter." A problem with the book is that he decided on a super-trial, in which he filled his shopping cart with everything that looked good to him [hey- always wanted to learn the lute, exercise looks good, and the luminosity site looks impressive...]. Problem is, even if you think his i-feel-better conclusion warrants jumping in yourself, you don't know if only, say, the musical instrument learning provided the benefit, or whether all his ingredients helped, or... etc. Also: he looked only Trans cranial Magnetic Stimulators, not the half-dozen other machines on marketplace, so no help there. One technique he approved is the nicotine patch! Surprise!! I read that nicotine dumbs you down by constricting blood vessels to brain. I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here. And the whole scene is changing by the month. My personal conclusion, read serious books to stretch the old noodle, maybe learn an instrument, and of course exercise, but don't pry open your wallet for apps and/or gizmos, because the evidence just isn't here yet. PS: as of this writing, August 2016, Scientific American just published a feature article enthusing over videogames as brain boosters. I'm sure that'll come as a shock to the University of Montreal that just published a study [2015] demonstrating hippocampus shrinkage in video-gamers that indulged more than 6 hrs a week!