KACHARAGADLA

You can have a youthful brain at any age Learning how to integrate brain, mind, and heart into a harmonious whole has never been more needed. The sheer number of  demands that compete for our limited time, attention and energy  is unprecedented in human history, and it is no wonder that we cannot always manage them with ease. This pressure may partially account for the explosion of chronic health challenges that plague people the world over. And with an aging population, experts expect an  epidemic of age-related brain illnesses  that society will be ill equipped to confront. In the face of these challenges, developing the resilience and vitality to better adapt and thrive in the second half of life has never been more urgent. The second half of life will no doubt be filled with  unavoidable challenges . But there is a clear path through these challenges, a path rooted in brain science, in practices attentive to the physical needs of body and brain, in mindful awareness, in

When it comes to success, it’s easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind (and your attitude). Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ. Dweck found that people’s core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you’re challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed. People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.

RESEARCHERS HOPE TO USE THIS INFORMATION TO BETTER UNDERSTAND AND TREAT AUTISM, ADHD If you’ve ever had to cook dinner, prepare for the next day’s work meeting, while also listen to a friend complain over the phone, then you know all too well the importance of multitasking. But what's actually going on inside our brains that allows for us to strategically focus on one task over another? That's remained largely a mystery, at least until recently. Earlier this week, researchers at New York University published a paper in the journal  Nature saying they identified one small region of the brain—the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN)—as the one that controls our ability to multitask. Working as a task "switchboard", the TRN enables our brains to focus on the sensory stimulus that is most vital at any given moment. Now, with a better understanding of how the process works, researchers hope to use the information to study diseases in which multitasking or sensory overl