Michael Colgan News: December 2007
Dr Colgan's book Save Your Brain ,has now received excellent reviews in the press. Those, plus 10,000+ sales, plus one presentation to a university audience, and lectures at three health shows, have yielded multiple news and TV pieces, and multiple invitations to speak at health shows in the US and Canada (He starts 2008 with two invited papers at the 16th Annual Wellness Show in February at the Vancouver Convention Center) then at two international anti-aging congresses in 2008, in Florida and in Portugal. Click here for Abstracts so that you have an idea of the sort of thing Dr Colgan lectures about professionally.
The Canadian government has also become interested in Dr Colgan again (He was a consultant to them in 2002-2003), so he may be spending some time in Ottawa next year.
He has also been invited by Professor Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco, one of the world's top brain researchers, to run a two-year study in Canada, as part of the massive world-wide research effort on stimulation of human brain growth and improvement of memory, learning and cognition. This amazing breakthrough has not hit the media yet, but there is a 90-minute PBS special coming out this month (December, 2007) on the research, after which all hell will break loose. Major scientists are calling it the biggest advance in medicine since antibiotics. You can get details from UC San Francisco, or from www.positscience.com.
We will be using materials from Dr Merzenich's program in the continuation of the Brain Course next year. Summaries of double-blind studies have been published from U California, Yale, Case Western Reserve, Harvard and other universities, the latest being of 562 subjects using Merzenich programs, showing significantly enhanced learning, memory, auditory discrimination and visual discrimination. This occurs after only 12-16 weeks of five hours per week on the computer program, with new brain growth verified by magnetic resonance imaging before and after. The improvements also generalize to other learning tasks, and endure at least six months after the program ends (more long-term checks yet to be done).
At Dr Merzenich's invitation, Dr Colgan will be adding his brain nutrition component in a quadruple-blind trial, and we are anticipating even bigger results over the next two years. He begins recruiting subjects in January and already has five committed people very interested. We are setting up ten computer terminals here to run it.