Cognitive Labs

Chocolate has been shown in a new study to boost brain power while completing a battery of computerized neuropsychological tests. Chocolate Milk may even be more beneficial. While bearing down on attention-requiring work, such as spreadsheets, imputed interest calculations, your own stock indexing algorithm, programming, or perhaps, programming a new and improved reaction time exercise using javascript or the wondrous actionscript - it might be a good idea to eat m&m's or hershey bars and wash it down with a draught of chocolate milk. Afterwards, you'll need to lift weights and take a brisk walk to avoid the result of excess nutrients (fat).

"Chocolate contains many substances that act as stimulants, such as theobromine, phenethylamine, and caffeine," Dr. Bryan Raudenbush from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia noted in comments to Reuters Health.

"These substances by themselves have previously been found to increase alertness and attention and what we have found is that by consuming chocolate you can get the stimulating effects, which then lead to increased mental performance."

To study the effects of various chocolate types on brain power, Raudenbush and colleagues had a group of volunteers consume, on four separate occasions, 85 grams of milk chocolate; 85 grams of dark chocolate; 85 grams of carob; and nothing (the control condition).

After a 15-minute digestive period, participants completed a variety of computer-based neuropsychological tests designed to assess cognitive performance including memory, attention span, reaction time, and problem solving.

"Composite scores for verbal and visual memory were significantly higher for milk chocolate than the other conditions," Raudenbush told Reuters Health. And consumption of milk and dark chocolate was associated with improved impulse control and reaction time....


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060524/hl_nm/chocolate_power_dc

Flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields....

Flow is one of the characteristics of games that can be leveraged to achieve beneficial effects, by immersing the player into the game world.

I thought I would share a couple of interesting examples I have seen:


Electroplankton - Nintendo DS (Japan only)

another Flash game that was on digg is this and represents a Master's thesis in game design...

Here it is Exercise your brain.

called the Internet. It was supposed to do wonderful things for people. And it did. Then the whole thing got out of control. People got away from what was really important.

I just got an email from a top researcher in the field of memory research wanting to know how we get so many people interested enough to sign up for a research study.

It's a good question...

We're not offering anything, we're not paying anything. All we offer is an outlet for people to improve themselves, if they want.

...the point is, we seem to be more effective than expensive radio ads, the newspaper or other traditional media outlets and not just by a percentage basis, it's a complete transformation, a complete change by several standard deviations, if you look at statistically. i guess, in a casual way, without a lot of hype and fanfare, the internet is changing the world after all, for the better : - )