This study, led by Duncan Astle from the MRC at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom is one of my personal favourites. It demonstrates improvements in the functioning of the fronto-parietal brain network following Cogmed working memory training. In addition they demonstrate that the neurophysiological changes were directly related to level of improvements in WM following training. 

This paper goes a long way to address both the long term effects and the far transfer of Cogmed training, with a randomized and controlled study of 31 school classes, with 16 treated and 15 classes acting as control. After a five week treatment, there was clear evidence of far-transfer effects in geometry, reading ability, fluid IQ, measured impulse inhibition as well as teacher-rated self-regulation ability. Follow-up after four years showed an increased acceptance rate to the academic school track of 16 percentage points. What other intervention comes even near these kind of results?

This is an incredibly important subject: what is and what isn’t food! Two UK-based doctors discuss this. Dr Chris van Tulleken’s book – Ultra Processed People: The Science Behind Food that isn’t Food – made the Economist magazine ‘Best Books of 2023’ list.

Peter van Kets featured a lot of the work I did with him on resilience in his best-seller ‘Grin and Bear It’, published in 2022.