Here you have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

Quick, Are videogames good or bad?

That’s an impos­si­ble ques­tion. Good or bad for what? What  spe­cific games are we talk­ing about? More impor­tantly, what are they sub­sti­tut­ing for, given time is a lim­ited resource?  Con­trib­u­tor Jeremy Adam Smith, man­ag­ing direc­tor of Greater Good mag­a­zine, offers an in-depth review on the trade-offs videogames present in: Play­ing the Blame Game.

News Round-Up

Math Inno­va­tion in UK Schools: a recent (and unpub­lished) study seems to sup­port the poten­tial role for “Seri­ous Games” in edu­ca­tion. Learn­ing and Teach­ing Scot­land reports sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments in pupils’ con­cen­tra­tion and behav­ior, on top of math skills, after using Nin­tendo Brain Train­ing game.

We just received this quote of how a major health sys­tem is using our Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket Report:

“At Sut­ter Health Part­ners we rec­og­nize the impor­tance of brain health and how much the health of the brain and the body are inter­de­pen­dent.  The mar­ket report helped us fur­ther tar­get our coach­ing efforts to inte­grate brain fit­ness and upgrade our entire coach­ing plat­form.  It is easy to read and gives you the indus­try per­spec­tive in a thor­ough yet con­cise man­ner.  I highly rec­om­mend it!”

– Mar­garet Sabin, CEO of Sut­ter Health Part­ners and VP, New Prod­uct Devel­op­ment, at Sut­ter Health.

You may won­der, “what is the link between  well­ness coach­ing and brain fitness”?

In prac­tice, good health and well­ness coaches pro­vide excel­lent brain health advice, given that the areas they focus on (nutri­tion, phys­i­cal exer­cise, stress man­age­ment) do play an impor­tant role in main­tain­ing our brains in top shape.

Addi­tion­ally, pio­neers  such as Sut­ter Health Part­ners are adding a Brain “lens” to their work. How?

First, by bet­ter under­stand­ing and explain­ing the brain ben­e­fits of what they already do, in order to pro­vide addi­tional moti­va­tion to stick with healthy behav­iors. For exam­ple, most peo­ple will be able to recite mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits of mod­er­ate car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cise. But how many know  that it can also con­tribute to neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis –the cre­ation of new neu­rons — in adult brains?

Sec­ond, by start­ing to offer brain fit­ness guide­lines to clients who want too go beyond cross­word puz­zles and sudoku.

I had a great train­ing ses­sion with a num­ber of Sut­ter Health coaches last week — let me sum­ma­rize some of the main points we cov­ered. Read the rest of this entry »

A round-up of inter­ested news dur­ing the month:

1) Train­ing Young Brains to Behave (New York Times)

2) Head Games (OpEd in New York Times)

3) Will Geron­tol­ogy rec­og­nize the Brain? (Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging event)

4) Brain func­tion gets a boost from walk­ing (Los Ange­les Times)

5) An idea whose time has (finally) come (McKnight’s Long Term Care News)

6) Train your brain (Finan­cial Times Germany)

7) Toman auge ejer­ci­cios que adies­tran la mente (Mile­nio, Mexico)

Trois nou­vellestudes IDATE : Seri­ous Games (Publi-News, France)

Links and com­men­tary below. Read the rest of this entry »

Play­ing the Blame Game
– Video games stand accused of caus­ing obe­sity, vio­lence, and lousy grades. But new research paints a sur­pris­ingly com­pli­cated and pos­i­tive pic­ture, reports Greater Good Mag­a­zine’s Jeremy Adam Smith.

Cheryl Olson had seen her teenage son play video games. But like many par­ents, she didn’t know much about them.

Then in 2004 the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice asked Olson and her hus­band, Lawrence Kut­ner, to run a fed­er­ally funded study of how video games affect adolescents.

Olson and Kut­ner are the co-founders and direc­tors of the Har­vard Med­ical School’s Cen­ter for Men­tal Health and Media. Olson, a pub­lic health researcher, had stud­ied the effects of media on behav­ior but had never exam­ined video games, either in her research or in her per­sonal life.

And so the first thing she did was watch over the shoul­der of her son, Michael, as he played his video games. Then, two years into her research—which com­bined sur­veys and focus groups of junior high school students—Michael urged her to pick up a joy­stick. “I def­i­nitely felt they should be famil­iar with the games if they were doing the research,” says Michael, who was 16 at the time and is now 18.

Olson started with the PC game Read the rest of this entry »

Com­puter game boosts maths scores (BBC):

- “It also found improve­ments in pupils’ con­cen­tra­tion and behaviour.”

- “The study involved more than 600 pupils in 32 schools across Scot­land using the Brain Train­ing from Dr Kawashima game on the Nin­tendo DS every day.”

- “Researchers found that while all groups had improved their scores, the group using the game had improved by a fur­ther 50%.”

- “Less able chil­dren were found to be more likely to improve than the high­est attain­ers and almost all pupils had an increased per­cep­tion of their own ability.”

Com­ment:  fas­ci­nat­ing results sup­port­ing the poten­tial role for “Seri­ous Games” in edu­ca­tion. Now, please take the results with a grain of salt, since the study doesn’t seem to have been pub­lished yet in any top-tier peer-reviewed jour­nal.. The infor­ma­tion pub­licly avail­able seems to sim­ply con­sist of a press release by Learn­ing and Teach­ing Scot­land. We hope to see an in-depth report to answer many open ques­tions on the study. In any case, wel­come news!

Here you have the lat­est edi­tions of two excel­lent blog car­ni­vals. Pay a visit if you are inter­ested in meet­ing some great edu­ca­tion and health bloggers.

- Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion #190, by Steve Spangler.

- Grand Rounds: this time, hosted by Kev­inMD and Kim on behalf of Dr. Val.

Enjoy!

Dur­ing the research phase before the pub­li­ca­tion of the spe­cial report Brain Fit­ness Cen­ters in Seniors Hous­ing — A Field in the Mak­ing, pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Seniors Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (ASHA), we real­ized that there were equal amounts of inter­est and con­fu­sion among exec­u­tives and pro­fes­sion­als think­ing about adding computer-based cog­ni­tive exer­cise prod­ucts to their mix of health & well­ness activ­i­ties, so we included the Eval­u­a­tion Check­list that follows.

The real-life expe­ri­ences at lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions such as Senior Star Liv­ing, Bel­mont Vil­lage Senior Liv­ing, Erick­son Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties and oth­ers were instru­men­tal in the devel­op­ment of the Check­list. We hope it is useful.

Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams For Seniors Hous­ing, Health­care and Insur­ance Providers: Eval­u­a­tion Checklist

Over the next sev­eral years, it is likely that many seniors hous­ing oper­a­tors will begin to care­fully eval­u­ate a grow­ing num­ber of options to include “brain fit­ness cen­ters” in their communities.

Some options will require pur­chas­ing a device, such as Nin­tendo prod­ucts, or the Dakim touch-screen sys­tem. Oth­ers will require installing soft­ware in PCs in exist­ing or new com­puter labs, such as Posit Sci­ence, Cogmed or CogniFit’s pro­grams. Oth­ers will be fully avail­able online, such as those offered by Lumos Labs, Happy Neu­ron and My Vig­or­ous Mind. And still oth­ers may be technology-free, promis­ing engag­ing com­bi­na­tions of inter­ac­tive, group-based, activ­i­ties with pen-and-paper exercises.

Cre­at­ing a solid busi­ness case will help com­mu­ni­ties nav­i­gate through this grow­ing array of options. We sug­gest com­mu­ni­ties con­sider this Sharp­Brains Check­list for Brain Fit­ness Centers:

1. Early Users: Who among our res­i­dents is ready and will­ing to do the pro­gram? How are they react­ing to the pilot test­ing of the program?

2. Cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits: What are the spe­cific ben­e­fits claimed for using this pro­gram? Under what sce­nario of use (how many hours/week, how many weeks)? What spe­cific cog­ni­tive skill(s) does the pro­gram train? How will we mea­sure progress? Read the rest of this entry »

Brain-fitness plan can improve mem­ory (Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald), reports on the recent endorse­ment of Posit Science’s pro­grams (Posit Sci­ence Pro­gram Clas­sic, focused on audi­tory pro­cess­ing train­ing, and Posit Sci­ence Cor­tex^™ with InSight^™, on visual pro­cess­ing). Quotes: Read the rest of this entry »

Great arti­cle in the New York Times titled Train­ing Young Brains to Behave. A cou­ple of quotes:

- “But just as biol­ogy shapes behav­ior, so behav­ior can accel­er­ate biol­ogy. And a small group of edu­ca­tional and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists now say that men­tal exer­cises of a cer­tain kind can teach chil­dren to become more self-possessed at ear­lier ages, reduc­ing stress lev­els at home and improv­ing their expe­ri­ence in school. Researchers can test this abil­ity, which they call exec­u­tive func­tion, and they say it is more strongly asso­ci­ated with school suc­cess than I.Q.”

- “We know that the pre­frontal cor­tex is not fully devel­oped until the 20s, and some peo­ple will ask, Read the rest of this entry »

A recent CNN arti­cle explains well why a grow­ing num­ber of com­pa­nies use brain­teasers and logic puz­zles of a type called “guessti­ma­tions” dur­ing job interviews:

- “Seem­ingly ran­dom ques­tions like these have become com­mon­place in Sil­i­con Val­ley and other tech out­posts, where com­pa­nies aren’t as inter­ested in the cor­rect answer to a tough ques­tion as they are in how a prospec­tive employee might try to solve it. Since busi­nesses today have to be able to react quickly to shift­ing mar­ket dynam­ics, they want more than engi­neers with high IQs and good col­lege tran­scripts. They want peo­ple who can think on their feet.”

What are tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies (Google, Microsoft, Ama­zon) and con­sult­ing com­pa­nies (McK­in­sey, Boston Con­sult­ing Group, Accen­ture…) look­ing for? They want employ­ees with good so-called Exec­u­tive Func­tions: problem-solving, cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­ity, plan­ning, work­ing mem­ory, decision-making, even emo­tional self-regulation (don’t try to solve one of these puz­zles while being angry, or stressed out).

Want to try a few? Below you have our Top 7 Guesstimations/ Logic Puz­zles for Brain Challenge:

Please try to GUESS the answers to the ques­tions below based on your own log­i­cal approach. The goal is not to find out (or Google) the right answer, but to Read the rest of this entry »