SharpBrains

Let's now exercise our Occipital Lobes (visual interpretation and rotation). (Basic brain anatomy here)

Please pick the piece that's missing from the diagram on the left. You can find the anwer as a Comment.

Brain Fitness and Brain Exercise: what it is, and why it is important

I may be slightly biased, but I clearly see more and more talk and articles about "Brain Fitness". Which is great news.

We view Brain Fitness as the combination of science-based Brain Fitness Assessments, Brain Fitness Programs, Brain Fitness Coaches, and Brain Fitness Communities, to help us all sharpen our minds and prevent or delay potential problems.

In the 90s, eating well and exercising were shown to be crucial to our well-being and healthy aging. We join physical fitness gyms to work out our bodies, expand cardiovascular capacity and develop good muscles. Trainers teach us that novelty and variety are important and that having some structure helps us achieve our physical fitness goals.

Now, the need for exercising our brains is starting to become understood. We believe that Brain Fitness will grow to one day become as widespread as physical fitness, and "brain gyms" will complement today's gyms. We aspire to provide useful and fun

- Brain Fitness Assessments: to allow every person to identify areas to work on, establish a baseline to analyze performance over time, and measure the effectiveness of “brain gym” workouts
- Brain Fitness Programs: to allow everyone to exercise mental areas as needed, both improving strengths and solving bottlenecks that prevent overall progress. Programs may help improve working memory, manage stress, maintain overall brain health, develop sport-specific "game-intelligence", and others
- Brain Fitness Coaches: to guide, support and tailor programs for anyone interested in building mental muscles
- Brain Fitness Communities: to provide a welcoming and stimulating environment for everyone to exercise our brains

Enjoy the evening

Let's exercise our brains this weekend. Our Frontal Lobes (that deal with planning, among other things), and Parietal Lobes (calculations).

Please try to guess the answers to the questions below (you don't need to know, or research, the right answer, simply try to "guesstimate" an appropriate range).

- How many shoes have you had in your life?

- In 1999, how were these baby girl names ranked by popularity: Barbara, Amber, Emily, Tracy

- In 1999, how were these baby boy names ranked by popularity: Kevin, Gary, Jose, Hugh

- What is the weight of a large commercial airplane?

Will post the answers by Monday. No, not for the first question!

Second and last day of the 6th Annual Neurotech Leaders Forum.

Highlights
- Deeper review into the challenges the sector (mainly neurodevices) face, such as complexity of reimbursement process, and lack of reasonable agreement as to what "scientific evidence" means (Medicare and Medicaid require randomized double-blind protocols, which is tough, if possible in ensure in some cases)

- The Neurotechnology Industry Organization, to be formally presented at the Society for Neuroscience Conference could fill an important role there.

- Dr. Michael Merzenich was among the recipients of the Gold Electrode Award 2006. Dr. Merzenich is one of the pioneers in this field and Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of two leading companies in this sector: Scientific Learning .
and Posit Science .

- We presented our view of the Brain Fitness market, with the following Executive Summary:

1) The computer-based Brain Fitness Programs field is a new and growing field, driven by recent major scientific findings, the first programs with clear clinical data and the emergence of wide public awareness of the need for “brain exercise”

2) SharpBrains brings to market computer-based, proven, best-of-breed cognitive neuroscience applications to present a full “brain gym”. The programs are developed by research institutions and/ or affiliated companies worldwide

3) Some programs we have identified are targeted at
- Overall brain maintenance
- Bio-feedback based stress management
- Working memory training for people with ADD/ ADHD
- Basketball-specific “game-intelligence”. Yes, this can be trained too!

Enjoy the weekend

Do we have selective attention? Do we all have "attention deficits"? or are they "working memory" challenges?

Let's try this little experiment, conceived by Simons and Chabris for their classic study on sustained inattentional blindness (1999).You will watch a brief video clip, and your challenge is to count the total number of times that the basketballs change hands.

Click here to view the Basketball Experiment clip (To view it, you will need to have Java active in your browser. The video is fairly large, 7.5MB, and it might take a while to finish loading.)

You can read about the fascinating results here.

Credit for pic: Haines World

The first day of the 6th Annual Neurotech Leaders Forum took place today. Good group, with content focused on

a) the basic scientific underpinnings of the neurotechnology sector, delivered by Warren Grill, Associate Professor of BioMedical Engineering at Duke University, and

b) market segmentation and trends, by Neurotech Reports' founder James Cavuoto.

James defines the neurotechnology market as "the application of electronics and engineering to the nervous system", and categorizes it into 4 segments: neuromodulation, neurorehabilitation, neurosensing and neural prostheses.

How is this relevant to the Brain Fitness Revolution?

For one, both fields share a common problem today: the need for larger public and clinician education, so that there is more understanding on recent research findings and their implications for our lives and health care.

More importantly, James did a good job at defining Brain Fitness Programs as "natural stimulation", meaning that the intervention to train/ improve one's neural circuits does not require an invasive treatment. Fitness is not about procedures such as deep brain stimulation. Yet, he added, companies such as Posit Science have designed their products in a way that stimulate the precise parts of the brain that need that stimulation and re-wiring.

SharpBrains is presenting tomorrow.

Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, when discussing different Frontal Lobe, functions in his Wisdom Paradox book, adds that "Executive intelligence" includes "the ability to penetrate other people’s minds, and that starts with an interest in other people’s minds."

What do we call a window into other people's emotions? A face.

Paul Ekman has conducted extensive research on identifying emotions through facial expressions. As part of that research, and as part of the power of discipline and training, he learned how to consciously manipulate 42 facial muscles, including many that in most of us are beyond our control, and even awareness.

Based on primary and secondary research, he found that there are seven emotions expressed in the face in universally consistent ways:
- Sadness
- Anger
- Surprise
- Fear
- Enjoyment
- Disgust
- Contempt

Even more interesting: according to his research, feelings and facial expressions influence each other. This is, not only a sad person will naturally look sad, but a person who intentionally smiles will feel more content than a person who doesn't.

You can read his advice on how to recognize feelings in order to communicate better, focused on doctor-patient relationships but useful to everyone (including patients who may want to make sure to get their point across).

Why is this relevant for Frontal Lobe functions? well, as part of your decision-making, you may benefit from knowing whether someone is lying to you, and you can refine your guess based on 10 tips that can let you know if someone is lying to you.

Question: from left to right, top then down, what universal feeling does each face indicate?
 

Which of the 2 circles in the middle of their respective "constellations" is bigger"?

In reality? in your eyes? what is happening? do you see any implications for our daily lives?

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded the 2006 MacArthur "Genius Grants" to 25 individuals for their "their creativity, originality, and potential to be significant contributors in their fields". We are happy that some friends received the award, and that we will be able to interview them here, in this blog.

How were they able to accomplish such a feat? what kind of brain is helping them? Also, how are their lifelong experiences shaping their brains?

We can not place them all under fMRI examination , so we will have to ask them questions to understand how they deal with, and developed, what neuropsychologists call Executive Functions, which are mostly located in our Frontal Lobes , the most recent part of our brains in evolutionary terms.

We will ask them about some key Frontal Lobe "Mental Muscles", such as:

Planning: foresight in devising multi-step strategies.

Flexibility: capacity for quickly switching to the appropriate mental mode.

Inhibition: the ability to withstand distraction, and internal urges.

Anticipation: prediction based on pattern recognition.

Critical evaluation: logical analysis.

Working memory: capacity to hold and manipulate information "on-line" in our minds in real time.

Fuzzy logic: capacity to choose with incomplete information.

Divided attention: ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.

Decision-making: both quality and speed.

A highly recommended book, if you are interested in learning more about Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes, is The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind , by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg. You can read an in-depth review here.

If you had some of the MacArthur Fellows in front of you, right now, what would you ask them?

Wikipedia says "Recent studies suggest that Working Memory can be improved by working memory training (Klingberg et al., 2002)...Perhaps of greater importance, another study has found after a period of working memory training an increase in a range of cognitive abilities and an increase in IQ test scores of approximately 8%."  

A search for "Torkel Klingberg" in PubMed returns 26 papers published in peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and Nature Neuroscience.

We are happy to launch our Neuroscientist Interview Series with an interview with Dr. Torkel Klingberg.

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): Welcome. Can you let us know where you work, and what your Lab does?
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