Cognitive Labs

(Atherton, CA) June 26, 2008. Peter Sealey, an expert in brand-marketing, has joined the Cognitive Labs board of advisors. Cognitive Labs is the fastest growing provider of science-based cognitive games.

Pete invented the concept of simplicity marketing, back to basics, and brand minimalism which today resonates with the digerati, whilst lampooning Hollywood's fear and trepidation of digital media's potential in Not On My Watch, and taught a famed course in digital marketing at the Haas School of Business...

"I'm delighted that Pete has decided to add his brand-building gusto and marketing vision to the Cognitive Labs project," said President Michael Addicott, "his is truly a superior genetic configuration for the deep understanding of these challenging and exciting times in which we live."

Here is his C.V.:

Dr. Peter Sealey is chairman and CEO of Sausalito Group, a brand consulting firm and one of the world's top marketing experts and business authors. Sealey was co-director of the Center of Marketing and Technology at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley from 1996 to 2006, has been a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and currently teaches entertainment marketing at the Drucker/Ito Center Graduate School of Management at Claremont University in Southern California. He consults to numerous top global corporations and Silicon Valley start-ups such as VeriSign, General Motors, Coke, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, Visa U.S.A., UPS, ImproveNet, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, The Eastman Kodak Company, Nokia and A.T. Kearney, Inc. He currently serves, or has served,on the Boards of Directors of cFares, Inc.,4Info, IMMI, inc., Reply!, StrongMail, Round Table Pizza, L90, Inc., MediaPlex, Inc., T/R Systems, United Parcel Service Capital, Learning Framework and Kinzan.com. He serves, or has served, on the Boards of Advisors of Intent MediaWorks, Facebook, Cognitive Labs, Rearden Commerce, Veoh Networks, Log Savvy, Inc., DiStreams, Inc., HomeGain.com, Space.com, AgentWare, Learning Framework, NetOyster, Zinio & eVoice.com.

Labels: advisoryboard, coglabs, digital, games, latimes, nytimes, sealey, watch

Motorcycle Repair Coping with Alzheimer's Disease

According to Denise Grady at the NY Times, sometimes it's best to go with the flow, in terms of dealing with symptoms of the disease.
Of course, you can keep working the brain to build reserve.




In a slide show (starting with the above image) William Utermohlen’s self-portraits reveal his descent into dementia over the span of nearly four decades. A self-portrait from 1967. Click-through to see it...

Labels: alzheimers, grady, nytimes

Chess champion Bobby Fischer, who won a world championship against a Soviet opponent in 1972 at the age of 28, passed away in Iceland.

Labels: fischer, nytimes

Scientists are beginning to realize that finding Alzheimer's earlier is the key to developing a preventative strategy.

It's possible that the destructive seeds of the disease are germinated decades before recognized onset. By then, it's almost too little, too late.

For that reason, developing a proactive approach earlier may yield dividends.

If your brain's processing speed begins to slow and the pace accelerates, that could be cause for concern.

For this self-monitoring is key. Some decline is normal with aging. Rapid decline is not. You would not want to carry 100 pounds of excess weight for 30 years and then find that your life expectancy is compromised. Well, it's the same for the brain

Labels: alzheimers, brain, nytimes, onset

Mutations relating to radiation are well-known in agriculture and have resulted in some of the recognizable advances in food science - see here in what might be considered an interesting harvest.

Labels: broad, crops, genetics, mutations, nytimes

NY Times - Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

A representation of one of the scenarios that scientists used to study out-of-body experiences.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

read all of it

Labels: blakeslee, nytimes, out-of-body-expeience, science

Some friends are getting the cognitivelabs widget - like the Tripover.

And there's a lot more showing up in our logs.

Here's the page where you can get it...if you're a web publisher. We all have NY Times aspirations.

Labels: nytimes, tripover, widgets

Ever move from New York to LA or back? Or just make that commute? Part of those 60's memories, from a rockumentary on Mamas and Papas..

.

Labels: lab, mamasandpapas, nytimes

As you listen to music, your brain reacts in different ways. With PET and MRI images now capturing the action, you can see what you hear.

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?”

This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have while listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to exploring this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, perhaps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on us.

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49, surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his lab look more like a recording studio.

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

Read more at the New York Times

Labels: brain, music, nytimes