Finally, what I’ve known for a long time, games are good for you!

Men’s Health Lists : MensHealth.com

. . . grab your joystick.

Not that joystick, but the one attached to your kid’s Xbox. British researchers found that the longer people play video games, the higher their levels of concentration, sometimes equaling a trained athlete’s ability to focus. “Playing video games requires a high level of concentration to be successful, and that seems to transfer to the real world,” says Jo Bryce, Ph.D., the study coauthor.

P.S. The Men’s Health lists breakdown by 1 paragraph per page to make people click their site more is just terrible, absolutely terrible!

Incoming search terms for the article:

• trading joystick

Some interesting concepts and ideas in this artcile. Most aren’t new but some have an interesting twist like the following approach to circumventing our primal instincts.

Does your brain have a mind of its own? – Los Angeles Times

Consider, for example, the difficulty that most people having in sticking to abstract goals like “I intend to lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline.” Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand. The work-around? Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems — which traffic largely in dumb reflexes — can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action: “If I see French fries, then I will avoid them.” As Peter Gollwitzer, my colleague in New York University’s department of psychology, has shown, even simple changes like these can markedly increase the chances of success.

If the brain has a brain of its own, might that brain also have another brain of it own… :-)

Lots of interesting and cool facts about the brain, how we think, remember etc.

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain | Mind & Brain | DISCOVER Magazine

The great secret of memory is that it mostly encodes the relationships between things more than the details of the things themselves. When you memorize a melody, you encode the relationships between the notes, not the notes per se, which is why you can easily sing the song in a different key. Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can destabilize the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure. Some intriguing recent experiments show it is possible to chemically block memories from reforming during that window, suggesting new ethical questions that require careful consideration.

And this is even more interesting, I noticed a lot of times ideas and new thoughts “pop” in my mind when I’m actually not doing anything.

Neuroscientists have mostly studied changes in brain activity that correlate with stimuli we can present in the laboratory, such as a picture, a touch, or a sound. But the activity of the brain at rest—its “baseline” activity—may prove to be the most important aspect of our mental lives. The awake, resting brain uses 20 percent of the body’s total oxygen, even though it makes up only 2 percent of the body’s mass. Some of the baseline activity may represent the brain restructuring knowledge in the background, simulating future states and events, or manipulating memories. Most things we care about—reminiscences, emotions, drives, plans, and so on—can occur with no external stimulus and no overt output that can be measured.