The IMPACT study which we reported on in Decem­ber 2007, funded by Posit Sci­ence, con­ducted by the Mayo Clinic and USC Davis, has just announced pub­li­ca­tion at the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Geri­atrics Soci­ety. Ref­er­ence:

- Smith et al. A Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Pro­gram Designed Based on Prin­ci­ples of Brain Plas­tic­ity: Results from the Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Study. Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Geri­atrics Soci­ety, April 2009.

Com­puter Exer­cises Improve Mem­ory And Atten­tion, Study Sug­gests (Sci­ence Daily)

- “The Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing (IMPACT) study was funded by the Posit Sci­ence Cor­po­ra­tion, which owns the rights to the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, tested in the study.”

- “Of the 487 healthy adults over the age of 65 who par­tic­i­pated in a ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial, half used the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for 40 hours over the course of eight weeks. The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram con­sists of six audio exer­cises done on a com­puter, and is intended to “retrain the brain to dis­crim­i­nate fine dis­tinc­tions in sound, and do it in a way that keeps the user engaged,” Zelin­ski explained.” The other half of par­tic­i­pants spent an equal amount of time learn­ing from edu­ca­tional DVDs fol­lowed by quizzes.

Com­ment: this is a very inter­est­ing study, in that it shows both that cog­ni­tive train­ing works, and that it doesn’t work.

What do I mean?

Well, it is time we move beyond this super­fi­cial dis­cus­sion on it works/ it doesn’t work, and we started dis­cussing Work for Whom? Work for What?

1) It works: the inter­ven­tion (com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing) showed cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits beyond the con­trol (edu­ca­tional DVDs fol­lowed by quizzes). This is sig­nif­i­cant both in that it shows that peo­ple over 65 can improve their men­tal abil­i­ties, and that can be done in scal­able ways, thanks to emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy tools. Obvi­ously more research needs to be done, but results like these would have been con­sid­ered impos­si­ble not so long ago.
2) It doesn’t work: those cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits were closely related to the trained audi­tory areas. The results don’t sup­port grandiose claims that the pro­gram “helps reju­ve­nate one’s brain 10 years” or sim­i­lar, which we hear all too often.

This is but one study in a rapidly grow­ing area (this one is pretty large, and multi-site, and con­ducted by inde­pen­dent researchers). The key ques­tions are becoming:

- 1) who may ben­e­fit most from improv­ing on spe­cific cog­ni­tive domains– audi­tory pro­cess­ing in this case?,
– 2) how can health­care pro­fes­sion­als sup­port patients from a pre­ven­tive and brain main­te­nance point of view (please note the study above had noth­ing to do with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease, but with the enhance­ment of cog­ni­tive func­tions)
– 3) how can con­sumers nav­i­gate the grow­ing num­ber of prod­ucts and claims?

For more on all this, you may enjoy read­ing these notes on Brain Train­ing: No Magic Bul­let, Yet Use­ful Tool. Inter­view with Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski, includ­ing:

- “The pro­gram we used, Brain Fit­ness 2.0, trains audi­tory pro­cess­ing. The peo­ple in the exper­i­men­tal group improved very sig­nif­i­cantly, which was not that sur­pris­ing. What was very sur­pris­ing was that there was also a clear ben­e­fit in audi­tory mem­ory, which wasn’t directly trained. In other words, peo­ple who were 75-years-old per­formed audi­tory mem­ory tasks as well as aver­age 65-year-olds, so we can say they reversed 10 years of aging for that cog­ni­tive ability.”

In short, if you are con­sid­er­ing buy­ing some of these new pro­grams, for your­self, your patients, a loved one…you do need to do a bit of home­work. Yes, it would be eas­ier if there were more spe­cific and cat­e­gor­i­cal answers…but for the time being there aren’t (apart from the gen­eral guide­lines to stay active phys­i­cally and men­tally, man­age stress lev­els, have a bal­anced nutri­tion). We pub­lished this 10-Question Pro­gram Eval­u­a­tion Check­list to sup­port your deci­sion process.

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