Round-up of recent news on cog­ni­tive health and brain fitness:

1) Impres­sive coup by Posit Sci­ence: Wal­ter Moss­berg reviews DriveSharp:

A Review of Dri­ve­Sharp (Wall Street Journal)

- “My ver­dict is that it was easy to use, and it did indeed work on my abil­ity to rapidly recall the color and posi­tion of mul­ti­ple mov­ing objects and of objects on the periph­ery of my vision. It intel­li­gently adjusted to my per­for­mance, and grad­u­ally pre­sented me with tougher tasks.”

- “How­ever, two major caveats are in order. First, I am nei­ther a sci­en­tist nor a doc­tor, so I can’t vouch for the company’s claims about DriveSharp’s ben­e­fits or even the under­ly­ing prob­lem it aims to alle­vi­ate. Sec­ondly, I wasn’t able to test Dri­ve­Sharp long enough to know if it actu­ally made me a bet­ter driver.”

2) Now, is the poten­tial lim­ited to older dri­vers? not really, as noted in this Seat­tle Times article:

Brain-fitness com­pa­nies apply­ing neu­ro­science to make safer dri­vers (Seat­tle Times)

- “Cog­niFit Pres­i­dent Shlomo Breznitz says pre­vi­ous ver­sions of this soft­ware have been in use by the largest dri­ving schools in the U.K. and Canada.”

- “The brains of new dri­vers have to acquire new skills that take time to develop,” he said. “Typ­i­cally, they take about two years of dri­ving, as wit­nessed by acci­dent records all over the world. By actively train­ing these skills the time needed for the brain to achieve the same level of exper­tise is short­ened. This short­ens the extremely high risk period of new drivers.”

3) Chal­lenge — do peo­ple under­stand what we are talk­ing about? not always, as reported in this great spe­cial issue of The Gerontologist:

GSA — Pop­u­la­tion Seg­ments Dif­fer on Per­cep­tions of Cog­ni­tive Health

- “All demo­graphic groups stud­ied believed that cog­ni­tive health is influ­enced by phys­i­cal, men­tal, and social activ­ity; how­ever, they dif­fered in opin­ions of the ben­e­fits of spe­cific activ­i­ties, nutri­tion, and genet­ics. The respon­dents also indi­cated that that media mes­sages about cog­ni­tive health are lim­ited and con­fus­ing. Fur­ther­more, many agreed that health mes­sages that incor­po­rate spe­cific com­mu­nity val­ues and are deliv­ered within pre-existing social groups by com­mu­nity lead­ers may be par­tic­u­larly effec­tive.“
– “Fund­ing for the spe­cial issue, titled “Pro­mot­ing Cog­ni­tive Health in Diverse Pop­u­la­tions of Older Adults: Atti­tudes, Per­cep­tions, Behav­iors, and their Impli­ca­tions for Community-Based Inter­ven­tions,” was pro­vided by the CDC’s Healthy Aging Program.”

All in all, very rel­e­vant data points that sug­gest the field is quickly approach­ing mainstream.

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