Newsweek’s Sharon Beg­ley writes a great note on Brain Train­ing: How It Works based on ini­tial data pre­sented at the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica over the week­end. Some quotes:

- With the nation’s 78 mil­lion baby boomers approach­ing the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys? moments, it’s no won­der the mar­ket for computer-based brain train­ing has shot up from essen­tially zero in 2005 to $80 mil­lion this year, accord­ing to the con­sult­ing firm SharpBrains.

- Now comes the largest and most rig­or­ous study of a commercially-available train­ing pro­gram, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morn­ing, at the meet­ing of the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica, sci­en­tists are pre­sent­ing data show­ing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour ses­sions with Brain Fit­ness 2.0 from Posit Sci­ence, elderly vol­un­teers got mea­sur­ably bet­ter in their brain’s speed and accu­racy of pro­cess­ing. And unlike every other train­ing pro­gram tested before, the improve­ments “gen­er­al­ize to broad mea­sures of cog­ni­tion and are notice­able in every­day life,” Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, who led the IMPACT (Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing) Study, reports.

- For the IMPACT study, 468 par­tic­i­pants, all healthy adults 65 and over, were divided into two groups. One received an hour a day of train­ing on Brain­Fit­ness for eight to ten weeks, and the other (the con­trol group) got the same amount of computer-based learn­ing. That choice of con­trol group is sig­nif­i­cant. It means that Brain Fit­ness was being com­pared not to star­ing into space or some sim­i­larly unhelp­ful activ­ity, but to one that might rea­son­ably be expected to improve men­tal ability.

- Because the Brain Fit­ness group showed greater improve­ments than the con­trols, includ­ing on tasks that the computer-based exer­cises did not explic­itly tar­get, it sug­gests that the audi­tory train­ing has altered some­thing fun­da­men­tal in the brain and not just spe­cific cir­cuits for, say, memory.

Read full post: Brain Train­ing: How It Works

The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica press release includes

- Researchers released ini­tial data today at the 60th Annual Meet­ing of The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica (GSA) that showed that doing the right kind of brain exer­cise can enhance mem­ory and other cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties of older adults.

- “We pre­sented these impor­tant results at the Annual Meet­ing of GSA, because aging experts need to spread the word that cog­ni­tive decline is not an inevitable part of aging, said Dr. Zelin­ski. “Doing the prop­erly designed cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties can actu­ally enhance abil­i­ties as you age.”

I will be inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski as part of our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series, so keep tuned.

One clar­i­fi­ca­tion: this is not the first study to show how cog­ni­tive train­ing can gen­er­al­ize beyond the tasks directly trained. Oth­ers have already shown an effect on cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and even on real-world tasks, on a vari­ety of age groups and trained func­tions. But the size of it (468 par­tic­i­pants) makes it by far the largest that does so, and the effects are very sig­nif­i­cant and promising.

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