Here you have a roundup of inter­est­ing recent news on cog­ni­tive health top­ics and my commentary:

1) Play­ing Video Games Offers Learn­ing Across Life Span, Say Studies

2) Men­tal Floss at Mil­i­tary Offi­cer Magazine

3) Brain Train­ing dom­i­nates ’08 Euro sales (CVG Online)

4) Dakim’s [m]Power Adopted by 150 Senior Liv­ing Com­mu­ni­ties … (Busi­ness Wire)

5) Clumsy kids more likely to become obese adults: study (CBC)

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1) There were a few inter­est­ing research papers pre­sented at the last  Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion con­ven­tions around the theme:

Play­ing Video Games Offers Learn­ing Across Life Span, Say Stud­ies
–Skills Trans­fer to Class­room, Sur­gi­cal Pro­ce­dures, Sci­en­tific Think­ing (press release).

Prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing study was that of 303 laparo­scopic sur­geons, which “showed that sur­geons who played video games requir­ing spa­tial skills and hand dex­ter­ity and then per­formed a drill test­ing these skills were sig­nif­i­cantly faster at their first attempt and across all 10 tri­als than the sur­geons who did not the play video games first.”

The note goes fur­ther to explain the impli­ca­tions from this research:

“The big pic­ture is that there are sev­eral dimen­sions on which games have effects, includ­ing the amount they are played, the con­tent of each game, what you have to pay atten­tion to on the screen, and how you con­trol the motions,” said Gen­tile. “This means that games are not “good’ or bad,’ but are pow­er­ful edu­ca­tional tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could.”

Very thought­ful quote. Please note a few ele­ments about the study and the quote itself:

- “video games requir­ing spa­tial skills and hand dex­ter­ity”: mean­ing, that pre­cise type of videogame. Other types may have other effects on cog­ni­tion, depend­ing on, as the note says, “the con­tent of each game”, defin­ing con­tent as what play­ers need to do in order to suc­ceed at the game.
– “laparo­scopic sur­geons”: it is clear that these are impor­tant skills for a sur­geon and not so impor­tant, say, for an econ­o­mist. Per­haps more econ­o­mists should be play­ing Age of Empires?

-  “are pow­er­ful edu­ca­tional tools”: yes, and in fact that is the premise of the Seri­ous Games field, but there also an unspo­ken fac­tor here: effi­ciency. If the main goal is enter­tain­ment, then the more hours of fun, the bet­ter. If the goal is a func­tional out­come (cog­ni­tive or real-life), then one would want the inter­ven­tion that works in the least amount of time. In other words, could a videogame be specif­i­cally designed for laparo­scopic sur­geons to improve the cog­ni­tive skills they need most for their jobs, and would that be more effi­cient than spend­ing X amount of hours play­ing a vari­ety of gen­eral games? Prob­a­bly, as you can explore in this inter­view with Prof. Daniel Gopher on cog­ni­tive simulations.

2) Good arti­cle on the August edi­tion of Mil­i­tary Offi­cer magazine:

Men­tal Floss (August 2008) (link opens a PDF-life doc­u­ment, you can read the text by Zoom­ing In).

My 2 favorite quotes, both by Dr. Molly Wag­ster, chief of the Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of Aging Branch, National Insti­tute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Md:

- “Cer­tainly as we age there are declines with brain func­tions and cog­ni­tion. But there’s evi­dence that the aging brain can adapt and change more than we ever thought”.

- “We don’t know how it hap­pens or how long changes last, but even in the face of these unan­swered ques­tions, there is the chance to main­tain our cog­ni­tive function”.

Com­ment: who among us won’t be tomor­row one day older than he/she is today? The good news about the “aging brain” doesn’t only refer to adults over 70!

3) Brain Train­ing dom­i­nates ’08 Euro sales (CVG Online)

- “Over­all, four of the ten best­selling DS games in both coun­tries dur­ing the first six months of 2008 were in the brain train­ing genre.”

- “Accord­ing to data released by sales mon­i­tor Media Con­trol GfK Inter­na­tional, the DS’s heavy­weight sta­tus in the Euro­pean con­sole mar­ket is closely tied to the pop­u­lar­ity of Nintendo’s Brain Train­ing series and other brain train­ing titles.”

- “The biggest demand for brain games is in Ger­many and Hol­land”, the com­pany said. More Brain Train­ing was the best­selling title in Ger­many dur­ing the first six months of the year, while Brain Train­ing topped the Dutch chart dur­ing the same period.

Com­ment: Fas­ci­nat­ing. Will brain-training-induced employee-productivity-increase help turn around the loom­ing reces­sion? we’ll track closely the per­for­mance of Ger­man and Dutch economies!

4) Dakim’s [m]Power Adopted by 150 Senior Liv­ing Com­mu­ni­ties … (Busi­ness Wire)

- “Dakim Inc. announced today that its [m]Power® Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Sys­tem has now been adopted by more than 150 senior liv­ing communities”

- “Users include Sun­rise Senior Liv­ing, Front Porch Com­mu­ni­ties, Diakon Lutheran Ser­vices, Ecu­men, Eska­ton, Bench­mark Assisted Liv­ing, and Los Ange­les Jew­ish Home for the Aging. Sev­eral neu­rol­o­gists and a local Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion chap­ter office have also pur­chased the system.”

- “Other prod­ucts are sta­tic. You buy a CD, put it in the com­puter, and that’s it. Peo­ple get bored and stop using them. Dakim has found a way to keep peo­ple com­ing back to chal­lenge their abil­ity, and that’s what our res­i­dents are doing. (said said Dou­glas Edwards, Direc­tor of Fund Devel­op­ment for West­min­ster Gar­dens in Duarte, Cal­i­for­nia, part of the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Pres­by­ter­ian Homes)

Com­ment: senior liv­ing is one of the obvi­ous areas where com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing (or “brain fit­ness pro­grams”) has a brighter future to com­ple­ment and enhance exist­ing health and well­ness pro­grams in scal­able ways, as we cov­ered in our Mar­ket Report. We are no longer sur­prised by the weekly press releases announc­ing a new “brain fit­ness cen­ter” in com­mu­nity XYZ. Now, what I find inter­est­ing is that last quote by Dou­glas Edwards, which I inter­pret as a direct com­men­tary on the Posit Sci­ence Brain Fit­ness pro­gram, the other lead­ing ven­dor for the senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties market.

5) The arti­cle Clumsy kids more likely to become obese adults: study (CBC)…

- “The study was based on tests of about 11,000 peo­ple in Britain who were tested for hand con­trol, co-ordination and clum­si­ness at age seven and 11, and were then fol­lowed until age 33.”

- “Prof. Scott Mont­gomery of the Karolin­ska Insti­tutet in Stock­holm and his col­leagues at Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don in Eng­land said they pur­posely chose mea­sure­ments of fine hand con­trol such as pick­ing up matches, rather than those likely to be influ­enced by par­tic­i­pat­ing in sports, such as catch­ing balls.”

- “While it is often assumed that the cog­ni­tive impair­ments seen in adult obe­sity are a con­se­quence of excess weight, that could be putting the chicken before the egg, the researchers say”

…reminds me of Judith Beck’s words on how to “Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person”

- “The main mes­sage of cog­ni­tive ther­apy over­all, and its appli­ca­tion in the diet world, is straight-forward: prob­lems los­ing weight are not ones fault. Prob­lems sim­ply reflect lack of skills–skills that can be acquired and mas­tered through prac­tice. Dieters who read the book or work­book learn a new cog­ni­tive or behav­ioral skill every day for six weeks. They prac­tice some skills just once; they auto­mat­i­cally incor­po­rate oth­ers for their lifetime.”

- “That is exactly my goal: to show how every­one can learn some crit­i­cal skills. The key ones are:”

- “1) How to moti­vate one­self. The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 rea­sons why they want to lose weight and read that list every sin­gle day.”

- “2) Plan in advance and self-monitor behav­ior. A typ­i­cal rea­son for diet fail­ure is a strong pref­er­ence for spon­tane­ity. I ask peo­ple to pre­pare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it.”

- “3) Over­come sab­o­tag­ing thoughts. Dieters have hun­dreds and hun­dreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelp­ful eat­ing behav­ior. I have dieters read cards that remind them of key points, e.g., that it isn’t worth the few moments of plea­sure they’ll get from eat­ing some­thing they hadn’t planned and that they’ll feel badly after­wards; that they can’t eat what­ever they want, when­ever they want, in what­ever quan­tity they want, and still be thin­ner; that the scale is not sup­posed to go down every sin­gle day; that they deserve credit for each help­ful eat­ing behav­ior they engage in, to name just a few.”

- “4) Tol­er­ate hunger and crav­ing. Over­weight peo­ple often con­fuse the two. You expe­ri­ence hunger when your stom­ach feels empty. Crav­ing is an urge to eat, usu­ally expe­ri­enced in the mouth or throat, even if your stom­ach is full.”

Com­ment: A prob­lem like the obe­sity epi­demic is, no doubt, a result of many fac­tors, where chicken and egg are often mixed. What mat­ters, though, is how to set up pub­lic health poli­cies and spe­cific plans that take into account the Cog­ni­tive dimen­sion: if adults can­not reg­u­late their own eat­ing and exer­cise habits, half the bat­tle is lost. And we know that, up to a point, self-regulation skills are learn­able and trainable.

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