Roger Doo­ley, author of the Neu­ro­mar­ket­ing blog, wrote in April an impres­sive overview of the Brain Fit­ness field in the Future­Lab blog. Enjoy his entry Mar­ket­ing Neu­ro­science: Brain Fit­ness.

Let me quote a cou­ple of sen­tences which sum­ma­rize the post:

“The two big dri­ving forces for the brain fit­ness move­ment are demo­graph­ics, par­tic­u­larly the aging baby boom pop­u­la­tion, and research, which indi­cates that the rate of brain impair­ment can be slowed by some kinds of men­tal stim­u­la­tion and activity.”

“The real ques­tion for com­pa­nies like Posit is whether peo­ple will pay a pre­mium price for their prod­uct rather than, say, work­ing free cross­word puz­zles or engag­ing in other men­tal activ­ity that costs noth­ing. The answer, I think, is “yes” — some peo­ple who have the resources will hap­pily pay for what they think is a proven and con­ve­nient solu­tion to their prob­lem. Even though peo­ple can walk for free, they still buy expen­sive tread­mills and join health clubs in the name of cardio-vascular fit­ness. It’s no big leap to imag­ine spend­ing a few hun­dred dol­lars if it seems likely to stave off the specter of men­tal decline.”

He also talks about the clas­sic Nun Study, pro­files Posit Sci­ence, and men­tions Nintendo’s game Brain Age Over­all, he pro­vides an excellent diag­nos­tic about what was known in the gen­eral media in April, when he wrote the post.

Let me now announce some Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams that the media will, I believe, start talk­ing about over the next months. Nei­ther the con­cept of Brain Fit­ness is rel­e­vant only for seniors, nor its only ben­e­fit is to pre­vent cog­ni­tive decline and, poten­tially, help delay con­di­tions such as Alzheimer’s. 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 to keep exer­cis­ing our brains is start­ing to become under­stood, and Brain Fit­ness, or Mind Fit­ness, will grow to one day become as wide­spread as phys­i­cal fit­ness, for kids, adults, and seniors. “Brain gyms” will com­ple­ment today’s gyms.

A few exam­ples of science-based pro­grams, apart from Posit Science’s (Note: Sharp­Brains has or will have busi­ness rela­tion­ships with the fol­low­ing com­pa­nies, pre­cisely because we believe many peo­ple will ben­e­fit from these programs):

ACE4sports has devel­oped a soft­ware based prod­uct to train the “game-intelligence” skills of pro­fes­sional and ama­teur bas­ket­ball play­ers. A num­ber of uni­ver­sity teams, includ­ing top NCAA bas­ket­ball teams such as Ken­tucky and Mem­phis, have imple­mented the pro­gram with great results on their team per­for­mance and play­ers’ coor­di­na­tion, atten­tion con­trol, periph­eral vision, per­cep­tion and more.

Cogmed devel­ops and mar­kets a software-based work­ing mem­ory train­ing prod­uct, RoboMemo. The Swedish researchers behind Cogmed, led by Karolin­ska Institute’s Torkel Kling­berg, MD, PhD, have shown that any per­son can improve his or her work­ing mem­ory by cor­rectly designed and intense train­ing. For peo­ple with seri­ous atten­tion deficits, improved work­ing mem­ory trans­lates to tan­gi­ble and mea­sur­able improve­ments in daily life.

A Vig­or­ous Mind rep­re­sents the prod­ucts devel­oped by Cog­niFit, using the lat­est sci­en­tific research to develop easy to use soft­ware that enhances human cog­ni­tive per­for­mance and health in a vari­ety of appli­ca­tions, from improv­ing dri­ving skills and abil­i­ties to pre­vent­ing cog­ni­tive decline.

The Insti­tute of Heart­Math (IHM), a California-based research insti­tute founded in 1991, has been con­duct­ing clin­i­cal stud­ies and basic research on emo­tional phys­i­ol­ogy and heart-brain inter­ac­tions, and on the phys­i­ol­ogy of learn­ing and per­for­mance. As a result of such research, IHM offers edu­ca­tional pro­grams such as The Resilient Edu­ca­tor to improve Teacher sat­is­fac­tion and reten­tion, and tech­nol­ogy offer­ings for stress man­age­ment such as PC-based Freeze-Framer Inter­ac­tive Learn­ing Sys­tem and hand­held emWave.

And there are more.

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