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However, contact between nerve cells is also constantly being set up and dismantled in adults. It is this continuous restructuring of the brain that allows us to learn and to forget.

In reality, it should actually be consuming much more energy. This is because both young and adult nerve cells allow many hundreds of cell extensions to grow towards their neighbours.

I recorded the audio from the session and will try to publish that soon in my podcast channel. The Keynote slide deck is available on SlideShare, although we only got through half the 91 slides during the 1.5 hour videoconference.

"One theory is that individual senses have separate areas of the brain dedicated to them," said Mark Wallace, Ph.D., the study's lead investigator. "In this view, information is processed initially on a sense-by-sense basis and doesn't come together until much later. However, this view has recently been challenged by studies showing that processing in the visual area of the brain, for example, can be influenced by hearing and touch."

Resilience is the ability to successfully manage life and adapt to stressful events. Resilience is developed in childhood, when there are loving people available to help during difficult times, but if a child feels alone, resilience is not developed just because challenging things are happening.

Due to recent brain research on neuroplasticity, we know that brains are growing and creating neural pathways during childhood and through adolescence. What's new in this book is the focus on a repetitive practice that strengthens these neural pathways and teaches young people concrete skills to calm themselves and focus their attention.

The interesting part of the connection between stress and learning is that the prefrontal cortex of the brain is the area for paying attention, calming, and focusing as well as the area for short- and long-term memory.

Most IQ tests attempt to measure two types of intelligence--crystallized and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence draws on existing skills, knowledge and experiences to solve problems by accessing information from long-term memory. Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems. The research shows that this part of intelligence can be improved through memory training.

Sampling the brain: A device by the Mayo Clinic can analyze and detect neurotransmitters locally in the brain. Blue wires link an external monitor (circuit board) to gray connectors, which are in turn linked to neurotransmitter-sensing electrodes (not shown). The device is battery operated (the battery is shown connected to the circuit board) and can transmit the neurochemical information from the electrodes to a remote station for analysis.

A three-year research project, headed by Mimi Ito, involving 28 researchers and 800 subjects, and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, finds that the stereotypical idea of the Internet as a soul-devouring, anti-social wasteland for our kids is just plain wrong. If you suspected otherwise, now you know you were right.

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Granger's original objective was to see if links could be established that allowed economists to use current economic data to forecast changes in the economy in the near future. But first author Steven L. Bressler, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, suspected the technique might help reveal if one brain area was passing data to or influencing another brain area.

"In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best.