A cou­ple of good recent articles:

(You can join our monthly newslet­ter by sub­scrib­ing at the top of this page).

Brain Games will give adults all the chal­lenge they can handle

Bal­ti­more Sun, MD. Mar 22, 2007.The reporter pro­vides a great sur­vey of prod­ucts. The only parts I find miss­ing are:

1) what spe­cific cog­ni­tive skill/s is/are being trained by each prod­uct? if we under­stand that the brain has a vari­ety of struc­tural and func­tional areas, it becomes evi­dent that dif­fer­ent pro­grams may be train­ing dif­fer­ent “men­tal muscles”.

2) How does each pro­gram enable the user mea­sure progress in an objec­tive way? I’d say this is the main dif­fer­ence between “games” and brain fit­ness pro­grams. If you have a wildly dif­fer­ent brain age every­time you try…that so-called brain age is not very credible.

Does brain exer­cise fight demen­tia?
Min­neapo­lis Star Tri­bune (sub­scrip­tion), MN. Mar 18, 2007.As the arti­cle men­tions, no pro­gram can claim to “pre­vent Alzheimer’s”. And I haven’t seen Posit Sci­ence (or us) claim such a thing, or imply it. But what can be claimed is meaningful:

First, tar­geted men­tal exer­cise can help us improve our short-term qual­ity of life. When many of our clients do reg­u­lar brain exer­cise, they most often are inter­ested in improv­ing mem­ory and other men­tal func­tions for the here and now; what may or may not hap­pen in 30 years is not the only rea­son to learn more about brain fitness.

Sec­ond, reg­u­lar brain exer­cise can slow the appear­ance of dis­ease related symp­toms. Stud­ies have shown that par­tic­u­larly in the early stages of these dis­eases, the brain is still able to learn and change.

Learn­ing is neu­ro­pro­tec­tive by increas­ing neu­ronal con­nec­tions between neu­rons, increas­ing cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism, and increas­ing the pro­duc­tion of nerve growth fac­tor, a sub­stance pro­duced by your body to help main­tain and repair neurons.

Unfor­tu­nately, noth­ing avail­able today can fully pre­vent these dis­eases from occur­ring. How­ever, reg­u­lar train­ing with a cog­ni­tive fit­ness pro­gram can post­pone the appear­ance of the cog­ni­tive symp­toms and build up your cog­ni­tive reserve.

Other arti­cles:

Learn­ing Slows Phys­i­cal Pro­gres­sion of Alzheimer’s Disease

I don’t want to ever retire. What can I do to remain sharp?

Cog­ni­tive Reserve and Lifestyle

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