TOP BRAINHEALTH BREAKTHROUGHS
- INNOVATIVE ENFORCEMENT: A Center for BrainHealth and Dallas police department collaboration sparked a new cognitive and mindfulness training initiative. The TODAY Show highlighted this innovative tool for law enforcement personnel.
- REASONING RIGOR: Academic Press published Center for BrainHealth deputy director Dr. Daniel Krawczyk’s textbook Reasoning: The Neuroscience of How We Think, a comprehensive guide to neural mechanisms behind thinking, reasoning and higher cognition.
- WHAT’S WEIGHING YOU DOWN: Findings by Dr. Francesca Filbey, published in the journal Obesity, demonstrate that having an impulsive personality — the tendency to consistently react with little forethought — is the key factor that links brain patterns of impulsivity and a high body mass index (BMI).
- BREAKING SOCIAL BARRIERS: Elsevier recognized a Center for BrainHealth virtual reality training research in its 2017 special collection of research articles for Autism Awareness Day. The study findings revealed improved social cognition performance, such as emotion recognition, attention and overall executive function.
- DECODING CRAVING: JAMA Psychiatry published Drs. Xiaosi Gu and Francesca Filbey model for a new, systematic and quantitative model for drug addiction research that targets craving: the intense, urgent feeling of needing or wanting drugs that often still persists after addiction recovery.
- ENHANCING THE AGING BRAIN: Healthy adults over the age of 55 who participated in a Center for BrainHealth cognitive training program demonstrated enhanced innovative thinking, along with corresponding positive brain changes. Findings from Dr. Sandra Chapman’s randomized clinical trial were published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
- RECOVERY CONTINUES YEARS AFTER INJURY: Dr. Kihwan Han recently published traumatic brain injury research that shows a Center for BrainHealth cognitive training protocol can stimulate structural changes and neural connections in the brain -- even years after a traumatic brain injury. The findings have the potential to be used to quantitatively measure treatment efficacy.
- WHAT CAUSES MARIJUANA ADDICTION: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded Dr. Filbey, Bert Moore Chair in BrainHealth, a $2.5 million grant to examine cannabis use disorders.