Fyi, I will be speak­ing at the fol­low­ing events:

» March 5th, New York Acad­emy of Med­i­cine, NYC. I will present Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware — Con­sumers Guide to dis­tin­guish­ing hope from hype, at the Com­pre­hen­sive Approach to Demen­tia Sym­po­sium spon­sored by Mon­te­fiore Med­ical Cen­ter and with credit des­ig­nated by Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine.

» March 15-19th, ASA/ NCOA annual con­fer­ence in Las Vegas. I will be pre­sent­ing two ses­sions. Reg­is­tra­tion is open now at 2009 Aging in Amer­ica Con­fer­ence, but there is lim­ited infor­ma­tion on the ses­sions. Will blog when there are detailed abstracts available.

- The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket, 16-Mar-09, 08:00 PM — 09:30 AM

- Brain Fit­ness in Senior Hous­ing: 18-Mar-09, 11:30 AM — 12:30 PM

» April 8th, Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina Greens­boro: Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness and the Aging Work­force: Oppor­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges, at the Sil­ver­ing Work­force Summit.

Below you have a col­lec­tion of recent news and announcements:

1) Brain Fit­ness Com­ing to Senior Exer­cise Classes (press release):

- “The Amer­i­can Senior Fit­ness Asso­ci­a­tion (SFA) has announced a new brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram designed for exer­cise pro­fes­sion­als. Brain Fit­ness for Older Adults teaches senior fit­ness instruc­tors and per­sonal train­ers how to incor­po­rate effec­tive cog­ni­tive fit­ness into phys­i­cal activ­ity pro­grams, offer­ing seniors the oppor­tu­nity to boost both phys­i­cal and men­tal fit­ness simultaneously.”

Com­ment: a very timely ini­tia­tive, given the inter­est we see in brain fit­ness edu­ca­tion and ini­tia­tives, and the ben­e­fits of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise on brain health. It makes a lot of sense to enhance pub­lic aware­ness through train-the-trainer ini­tia­tives. What remains unclear in this SFA pro­gram is what is the direct evi­dence for some­thing that is billed as a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram” and seems to advo­cate one par­tic­u­lar set of exer­cises and move­ments for their train­ers and train­ers’ clients. It is one thing to claim a prod­uct pro­vides good infor­ma­tion & is edu­ca­tional (like a book, or this blog, or classes on the brain & brain health) and another one to claim that it is a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram”, for which we should ask Read the rest of this entry »

Let me sum­ma­rize ten high­lights and reflec­tions from stim­u­lat­ing dis­cus­sions on cog­ni­tive health and assess­ments I have had this month so far.

Jan­u­ary 8-9th: Sym­po­sium on Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging (details Here), orga­nized by the Ari­zona State University’s Cen­ter for Adap­tive Neural Systems:

1. Cog­ni­tive health is a crit­i­cal fac­tor in over­all health­care, but is often approached in a frag­mented, non-systematic way. Most speak­ers in the sym­po­sium did men­tion how cog­ni­tive health issues inter­act with their spe­cific areas of focus (aging, Parkinson’s Dis­ease, trau­matic brain injury, Alzheimer’s…) but there was a lack of a com­mon frame­work and tax­on­omy to define the prob­lem and iden­tify solu­tions and inter­ven­tions to mea­sure and help main­tain cog­ni­tive health across the lifespan.

2. For exam­ple, Parkinson’s Dis­ease. Did you know (I didn’t) that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of Parkinson’s patients have well-identified cog­ni­tive impair­ments, mostly in their exec­u­tive func­tions but also per­cep­tual problems?

3. We truly need a Cul­ture of Cog­ni­tive Health, as Ran­dal Koene pointed out.

4. May online cog­ni­tive games serve as ongo­ing, real-time assess­ment of cog­ni­tive func­tion? Misha Pavel thought so. He also added we may well see “cog­ni­tive exer­cise coaches” some­time in the horizon.

5. Skip Rizzo pre­sented how vir­tual real­ity can help address Post Trau­matic Stress Dis­or­der (PTSD) and even to admin­is­ter inno­v­a­tive cog­ni­tive assessments.

6. My pre­sen­ta­tion, titled The Emerg­ing Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Mar­ket: Sta­tus, Trends and Chal­lenges, is avail­able Here

7. Jan­u­ary 22nd: Con­sumer Reports orga­nized a health sum­mit titled Read the rest of this entry »

Nin­tendo brain-trainer ‘no bet­ter than pen­cil and paper’ (The Times):
“The sur­vey of ten-year-old chil­dren found no evi­dence to sup­port claims in Nintendo’s adver­tis­ing cam­paign, fea­tur­ing Nicole Kid­man, that users can test and reju­ve­nate their grey cells. The Nin­tendo DS is a tech­no­log­i­cal jewel. As a game it’s fine, said Alain Lieury, pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Rennes, Brit­tany, who con­ducted the sur­vey. But it is char­la­tanism to claim that it is a sci­en­tific test.

Com­ments: as we have said before, Nin­tendo Brain Age and Brain Train­ing should be seen as what they are: a game. And the con­struct of one’s hav­ing a  “brain age” makes no sense.

Hav­ing said that, the researcher quoted then offers, out of the blue, a highly inac­cu­rate statement:

“The study tested Nintendo’s claims on 67 ten-year-olds. “That’s the age where you have the best chance of improve­ment,” Pro­fes­sor Lieury said. “If it doesn’t work on chil­dren, it won’t work on adults.”

That asser­tion (that some­thing won’t “work” on adults because it won’t “work” on kids) makes even less sense than hav­ing a “brain age”. The Cog­ni­tive Reserve research shows the need for life­long men­tal stim­u­la­tion — and the real­ity is that kids are more exposed to nov­elty and chal­lenge all the time, whereas older adults may not be. Fur­ther, that claim (some­thing that doesn’t “work” on kids won’t “work” on adults) has already been tested and proven wrong:

In a cou­ple of recent tri­als, dis­cussed here, the same strat­egy game (Rise of Nations, a com­plex chal­lenge for exec­u­tive func­tions), played for the same num­ber of hours (23)  showed quite impres­sive (untrained) cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits in peo­ple over 60 — and no ben­e­fits in peo­ple in their 20s.

How can this be? Well, we often say that our brains need nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge — and it should be obvi­ous that those ingre­di­ents depend on who we are Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: Daniel Gole­man is now con­duct­ing a great series of audio inter­views includ­ing one with Richard David­son on Train­ing the Brain: Cul­ti­vat­ing Emo­tional Skills. We are hon­ored to bring you this guest post by Daniel Gole­man, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine.)

——————–

Resources to help stu­dents build emo­tional intelligence

By Daniel Goleman

The scene: a first-grade class­room in a Man­hat­tan school. Not just any class­room this one has lots of Spe­cial Ed stu­dents, who are very hyper­ac­tive. So the room is a whirlpool of fren­zied activ­ity. The teacher tells the kids that they’re going to lis­ten to a CD. The kids quiet down a bit.

Then they get pretty still as the CD starts, and a man’s voice asks the kids to lie down on their backs, arms at their sides, and get a “breath­ing buddy,” like a stuffed ani­mal, who will sit on their stom­achs and help them be aware of their breath­ing. The voice takes the chil­dren through a series of breath­ing and body aware­ness exer­cises, and the kids man­age to calm down and stay focused through the entire six min­utes, which ends with them wig­gling their toes.

“You’ve just learned how to make your body feel calm and relaxed,” says the voice. “And you can do this again any time you want.”

The voice on the CD is mine, though I’m read­ing the words of Linda Lantieri, who has pio­neered pub­lic school pro­grams in social and emo­tional learn­ing that have been adopted worldwide.

Her newest pro­gram adds an impor­tant tool to the emo­tional intel­li­gence kit: mind­ful­ness, a moment-by-moment aware­ness of one’s inter­nal state and exter­nal envi­ron­ment. In a new book, Build­ing Emo­tional Intel­li­gence, which comes with the CD, Lantieri uses mind­ful­ness train­ing to enhance con­cen­tra­tion and atten­tion among kids, and to help them learn to bet­ter calm them­selves. Build­ing Emo­tional Intel­li­gence comes with instruc­tions that explain how teach­ers and par­ents can adapt Latieri’s exer­cises to kids at dif­fer­ent age lev­els (five to seven, eight to 11, or 12 and up) and pro­vides detailed expla­na­tions of each exercise.

Lantieri’s project exem­pli­fies the ways we can build on sci­en­tific insights to help chil­dren mas­ter the skills of emo­tional intel­li­gence. As Richard David­son, founder of the Lab­o­ra­tory for Affec­tive Neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin, explained to me in Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, mem­ory relies mostly on some tem­po­ral (in green) and frontal (in red) areas of the brain. These may be the areas that will get stim­u­lated when you (assum­ing you are Amer­i­can or have lived in the US for long) try to remem­ber the miss­ing words in the Amer­i­can proverbs below.

How­ever when it comes to inter­na­tion­als proverbs below you may have to use your rea­son­ing skills more than your mem­ory skills, as it is likely that you do not know these proverbs. In this case, the frontal exer­cise is more intense. Try to guess what the final words of each inter­na­tional proverb might be. Use your log­i­cal skills.

If you live out­side the USA, your expe­ri­ence will prob­a­bly be the reverse.

US proverbs

1. The early bird gets the ___________.
2. After all is _______ and done, more is said than __________.
3. From ___________ begin­nings come great ____________. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1993, Para­mount Pic­tures released Search­ing for Bobby Fis­cher, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin’s early chess suc­cess as he embarks on a jour­ney to win his first National chess cham­pi­onship. This movie had the effect of weak­en­ing his love for the game as well as the learn­ing process. His pas­sion for learn­ing was reju­ve­nated, how­ever, after years of med­i­ta­tion, and read­ing phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy. With this rekin­dling of the learn­ing process, Wait­zkin took up the mar­tial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, win­ning the 2004 push hands world cham­pi­onship at the age of 27.

After read­ing Joshua’s most recent book The Art of Learn­ing, I thought of a mil­lion top­ics I wanted to dis­cuss with him–topics such as being labelled a “child prodigy”, bloom­ing, cre­ativ­ity, and the learn­ing process. Thank­fully, since I was pro­fil­ing Wait­zkin for an arti­cle I was for­tu­nate enough to get a chance to have such a con­ver­sa­tion with him. I hope you find this dis­cus­sion just as provoca­tive and illu­mi­nat­ing as I did.

The Child Prodigy

S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?

J. This is a com­pli­cated ques­tion that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My rela­tion­ship to the game had become externalized-by pres­sures from the film about my life, by los­ing touch with my nat­ural voice as an artist, by mis­takes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my rela­tion­ship to learn­ing is the idea that we should be as organic as pos­si­ble. We need to cul­ti­vate a deeply refined intro­spec­tive sense, and build our rela­tion­ship to learn­ing around our nuance of char­ac­ter. I stopped doing this and fell into cri­sis from a sense of alien­ation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started med­i­tat­ing, study­ing phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy, and ulti­mately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.

S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?

J. I have never con­sid­ered myself a prodigy. Oth­ers have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embrac­ing the bat­tle, lov­ing the game, and over­com­ing adver­sity. Grow­ing up as Read the rest of this entry »

“Our jour­ney has never been one of short-cuts or set­tling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who pre­fer leisure over work, or seek only the plea­sures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the mak­ers of things — some cel­e­brated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have car­ried us up the long, rugged path towards pros­per­ity and freedom.”

…
“We will restore sci­ence to its right­ful place, and wield technology’s won­ders to raise health care’s qual­ity and lower its cost. We will har­ness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our fac­to­ries. And we will trans­form our schools and col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.”

Full text of Inau­gural Speech Here.

We hope you are all hav­ing (and mak­ing) a good day!

How do you know when some­thing is fast mov­ing towards a Glad­wellian tip­ping point? When health insur­ance com­pa­nies and pub­lic pol­icy mak­ers launch sig­nif­i­cant initiatives.

For exam­ple, the gov­ern­ment of Ontario recently announced a $10 mil­lion invest­ment with Bay­crest Research Cen­tre who will part­ner with MaRS Ven­ture Group to develop and com­mer­cialise brain fit­ness tech­nolo­gies. The invest­ment was matched by an addi­tional $10 mil­lion from pri­vate sources.

Another impor­tant devel­op­ment was the $18 mil­lion agree­ment between the Australian-based Brain Resource Com­pany (ASX:BRC) and OptumHealth in the US. This will allow for the pro­vi­sion of web-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments as part of a clinician’s deci­sion sup­port systems.

These are some ini­tia­tives cov­ered in a webi­nar Top Ten Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events of 2008 pre­sented in Decem­ber for Sharp­Brains’ clients. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez described the state of play and main dri­vers behind the growth of the bur­geon­ing brain fit­ness mar­ket — which I will try and sum­ma­rize here.

The key dri­vers seem to be Read the rest of this entry »

Brain Fit­ness Com­ing to Senior Exer­cise Classes (press release):

- “The Amer­i­can Senior Fit­ness Asso­ci­a­tion (SFA) has announced a new brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram designed for exer­cise pro­fes­sion­als. Brain Fit­ness for Older Adults teaches senior fit­ness instruc­tors and per­sonal train­ers how to incor­po­rate effec­tive cog­ni­tive fit­ness into phys­i­cal activ­ity pro­grams, offer­ing seniors the oppor­tu­nity to boost both phys­i­cal and men­tal fit­ness simultaneously.”

Com­ment: a very timely ini­tia­tive, given the inter­est we see in brain fit­ness edu­ca­tion and ini­tia­tives, and the ben­e­fits of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise on brain health. It makes a lot of sense to enhance pub­lic aware­ness through train-the-trainer ini­tia­tives. What remains unclear in this SFA pro­gram is what is the direct evi­dence for some­thing that is billed as a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram” and seems to advo­cate one par­tic­u­lar set of exer­cises and move­ments for their train­ers and train­ers’ clients. It is one thing to claim a prod­uct pro­vides good infor­ma­tion & is edu­ca­tional (like a book, or this blog, or classes on the brain & brain health) and another one to claim that it is a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram”, for which we should ask the same ques­tions we ask of any other inter­ven­tion to enhance cog­ni­tive func­tions, technology-based or not, fol­low­ing our 10-Question Pro­gram Eval­u­a­tion Check­list. What is the direct evi­dence that seniors trained by “senior fit­ness instruc­tors and per­sonal train­ers” using the method­ol­ogy that the SFA advo­cates will “boost both phys­i­cal and men­tal fit­ness simultaneously”?

10 Ques­tions to Choose the Right Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram — and a brief expla­na­tion of why each ques­tion is impor­tant: Read the rest of this entry »