Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, gives an informative and humorous talk at Google about brain science and his book “Brain Rules”.
In this talk he talks about brain rule number one which is that aerobic exercise boosts cognitive performance especially executive function. He says “if you have an active lifestyle you have a 50% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer”. He answers the question of how much exercise if required to get these benefits: Two to three times a week for 20 minutes per session. Aerobic exercise increases blood flow to the dentate gyrus of brain and elevates BDNF which is like Miracle Grow for brains.
Then he talks about stress on the brain. Stressed brains does not learn the same way and hurts learning. He says “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured.”
And he ends with the most important brain rule of all: curiosity.
David Pogue, New York Times columnist, starts off with a funny song about tech support. Before the talk has ended he also did a funny “Bill Gates Song” and another funny song on Steve Jobs. The rest of his talk is quite funny too as he shows why people like simplicity and as he shows examples of the opposite.
Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”
This is a song by Jonathan Coulton about a software coder (code monkey) who likes a girl. Jonathan quit is day job of writing code, and now he writes songs instead. You can find more songs by Jonathan Coulton at JonathanCoulton.com
A new wireless input device by Nintendo that consists of board that you stand on. As you move, you move the character on screen. You can do exercises following the animated character on screen or you can play games such as dance, hula hoop, soccer, and more. It even measures your body mass index.
In this 2004 documentary “Super Size Me”, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for a whole month. Doctors tracked what happens to his health during this experiment. The film explores the obesity epidemic and how much fast food is contributing to this.
