Two simple brain training methods

The group of researchers explored two brain rewiring methods to try to eliminate depressive trends in the girls. One was a simple computer game that aimed at training the brain to pay attention to positive stimuli over negative stimuli. The game showed pairs of faces: either a neutral face paired with a sad face or a neutral face paired with a happy one. After the pair was shown a dot replaced one of the faces and the girls had to click on the dot. To train the brain to pay attention to the positive faces over the negative faces, the dot always replaced the positive face. Compared to a group of girls for whom the dot randomly replaced the neutral, positive or negative face, girls for whom the dot always replaced the positive face were efficiently trained to avoid looking at the sad faces. This was observed after only one week of daily training.

The other brain rewiring method used by the group was similar to the biofeedback methods used to reduce stress. The activity in a network of brain regions previously associated with depression was measured via an fMRi scan and presented to the girls in the form of a thermometer on a screen. The girls were shown negative/sad pictures that would normally raise the activity in these brain regions (and thus raise the temperature of the “thermometer”) and tried to lower their brain activity by changing their mental states. Girls in a control group were shown brain activity from somebody else so they did not get to learn how to control their own mental states. After the training, girls in the experimental group showed less stress responses to negative stimuli.

It can work

Both brain training methods were thus efficient. One trained the girls at avoiding sad stimuli and the other at controlling mental activity in brain regions associated with depressive mental states. Both types of training were successful in diminishing stress-responses associated to negative stimuli. Such responses are a key symptom in depression.

Although these are only pilot studies involving very few participants, the results are very promising. They once more show how plastic the brain is and underline the high potential of brain training to help rewire and change behaviors.

Note the simplicity of the computer game used here: although the brain is a complex machine, behaviors sometimes do not need much to be modified. Taking behaviors early on may also help in the process of changing them. It is interesting to note too that similar behavior modifications can be achieved through other brain training methods such cognitive behavioral therapy in which old patterns of thoughts are replaced by new, healthier ones.

Credit for pic: BigStockPhoto.

— This article was written by Pascale Michelon, Ph.D. Dr. Michelon is Cognitive Sciences expert and has worked as a Research Scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis, in the Psychology Department. She is now an Adjunct Faculty at Washington University, and facilitates memory workshops in retirement communities in the St Louis area.

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With exceptions, the benefit of brain training in adults does not usually extend much beyond the trained tasks. In other word, people often get better in the tasks used during the training but not much in new, unrelated tasks. Is it different for younger, more plastic, brains?

Training Babies’ Brains

42 healthy, 11-month old babies were involved in the two-week study. Half participated in five training sessions of 177 minutes on average. The training involved screen-based tasks. The other half of the babies (the control group) spent the same amount of time watching infant-friendly television clips and still images. All babies’ eye movements were tracked during the sessions.

The training focused on attentional skills. Four tasks were used that all required the babies to use the direction of their gaze to make something happen on the screen. For example, in the butterfly task, as long as the baby fixated the butterfly it kept “flying” from one side of the screen to the other, while distractor images (of a cloud, a house, etc.) move in the opposite direction. As soon as the baby stopped looking at the butterfly, all the other images disappeared and the butterfly remained static on the screen. Such a task targeted selective or focused attention and the ability to resist interference (inhibition). The other tasks were designed to train other aspects of attention such as visual search, switching between tasks, keeping information in visuospatial working memory and using it. In all tasks, the level of difficulty changed adaptively in response to babies’ performance.

All babies were assessed before the training and at the end of the two-week study. The assessment focused on task-switching ability (a sign of cognitive control), sustained attention, eye movement reaction times, and working memory. To evaluate how much the benefits from the training would transfer to an untrained task the spontaneous viewing behavior of the babies was monitored while they sat in front of a puppet theater (structured free play).

The Results

After two weeks, only trained babies showed improvement in sustained attention and cognitive control as well as faster eye movement reaction times and quicker attention disengagement. The absence of training effect on working memory was surprising given the strong link between attention and working memory but the authors suggest that this may be explained by the fact that working memory is not very developed at this early age.

Did the effects of training transfer to the babies’ attentional behavior during free play? Somewhat. A trend (that is, some effect but not strong enough to be statistically significant) showed that trained babies shifted they attention from objects to objects more than untrained babies and also looked more often but using shorter glances at objects. What is this good? Because such a gaze pattern (more frequent and shorter gazes) has previously been linked at 9 months with superior language development later on at 31 months.

The question of transfer of benefits to untrained tasks is crucial in the brain training area. Indeed, what would be the point of training your brain at some computerized tasks to only perform better at these tasks but see no improvement in your daily life?

To this date, a few studies with adults report transfer of benefit to memory tasks very similar to the ones trained. A few more studies with children over 4 have shown transfer of benefit from working memory training to untrained memory and attentional tasks. The evidence from the new study reported here is another piece of data, showing that transfer is possible, though not in a striking way (remember that it was only a trend). This points to the fact that brain training may need to be specific to be effective.

The most surprising results of this new study is that training effect were observed a) in young babies and b) after only 2 weeks. Since attentional control is impaired in conditions such as autism or ADHD, it is promising to see that potential interventions could have some effects very early on in the development. The question though is how long do these training effect last?

References

Wass et al., (in press). Training Attentional Control in Infancy, Current Biology.

— This article was written by Pascale Michelon, Ph. D.. Dr. Michelon has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and has worked as a Research Scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis, in the Psychology Department. She is now an Adjunct Faculty at Washington University, and facilitates Memory Workshops in numerous retirement communities in the St Louis area.

Would it be possible then to train the brain of these people so that they show less delay discounting? Would that help them stay away from addictive substances?

Delay discounting is a brain function that involves the frontal lobes of the brain (behind the forehead). It builds upon working memory, our mental workspace where information necessary for the task at hand is hold and used.

Dr. Bikel and colleagues thus designed a study in which stimulants abusers participated in either a working memory training or a control training. They found that working memory training triggered a decrease in delay discounting. In other words, working memory training reduced the substance abusers’ devaluation of long-term rewards.

It is not known so far whether training working memory would indeed help in reducing the abuse itself but this is a very promising study. It may open the door to new substance abuse treatments, based on brain training.

Related post: What is Working Memory? Can it Be Trained?

Studying the auditory cortex of rats, they found that the expansion of a ‘skill-specific’ brain area with training is only short lived, even when changes in ability are long lasting.

So what does change? Although newly learned perceptual skills don’t show up in a bird’s eye view of the cortex, they must have some neurobiological basis. Kilgard suggests that learning probably results from a few parsimonious tweaks at a more microscopic level, involving relatively small numbers of neurons and synapses.

Kilgard speculates that the expanding cortical map is like a search committee. It’s generating a huge range of candidate solutions to a problem the brain has been tasked with, but doesn’t yet know how to solve. […] Once a good solution is found, the search committee is disbanded. Efficient changes that impart skill are retained, and the non-meaningful changes are winnowed away as the map shrinks.

getting off the couch and on your feet

maintaining a healthy weight with a low ratio of belly fat

Leading a brain-healthful lifestyle

Play games against the clock

Learn simple strategies to enhance your daily recall

Look for activities out of your comfort zone

Let’s add to this list managing your stress (via meditation or physical exercise for instance), staying socially connected, and reading interesting and stimulating posts! For more info, revisit our readers’ favorite one: The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains

ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, affects millions of children and adults (up to 5% of children in the US).  More and more evidence suggests that brain training may be key to help these individuals. With this in mind, we put together our most recent articles on the topic to  a)

What is ADHD?

What kind of attention is involved in ADHD? ADHD may be considered as a problem in the willful control of attention as opposed to a pure deficit in the ability to pay attention.

Self-Regulation and ADHD: The fun­da­men­tal deficit in indi­vid­u­als with ADHD may be one of self-control: Prob­lems with atten­tion may be sec­ondary char­ac­ter­is­tic of the disorder.

.Brain Training and ADHD

Working Memory Training has an indi­rect effect on atten­tion and can be ben­e­fi­cial to chil­dren with atten­tional prob­lems.

Working Memory Training & Medication Treatment for ADHD: Work­ing mem­ory train­ing improves work­ing mem­ory more than stim­u­lant med­ica­tion treatment, and ben­e­fits per­sist longer.

Training Attention and Emotional Self-Regulation: Atten­tion con­trol is com­plex but can be trained.

.Physical Exercise and ADHD

Exer­cise as a Treat­ment for ADHD: Phys­i­cal activ­ity may be ben­e­fi­cial to youth with ADHD.

.Diet and ADHD

‘Western’ Style Diet (high in total fat, sat­u­rated fats, refined sug­ars, and sodium) is asso­ci­ated with greater odds of hav­ing ADHD.

Herbal Treat­ment for ADHD: Appro­pri­ately pre­pared and tar­geted herbal com­pounds have the poten­tial to be ther­a­peu­tic and reduce atten­tion deficit symptoms.

.Meditation and ADHD

Mindfulness Meditation may benefit ado­les­cents and adults with atten­tion deficits.

.Neurofeedback and ADHD

Neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment for ADHD: ben­e­fits can last long after treat­ment had ended. Not all children show benefits though.

Laughing is thus good for your brain! Here are two fun ways to take a further look at laughter and the brain :

• Listen to these laughs and decide whether it is a human or a computer laughing.
• Try this to find out how much you are stressed. You may be surprised…

Enjoy!

171 children, aged 7 to 11, who were overweight and inactive participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to three groups: a low-dose group doing aerobic exercise 20 min/day, a high-dose group (40 min/day) and a no exercise control group. The exercise program lasted 13 weeks on average. The children cognition was assessed before and after the intervention. A subgroup of 20 children also underwent neuroimaging while performing a task measuring executive functions, before and after the intervention.

Results

The performance of the children in the exercise groups increased in a task measuring executive functions and to a much smaller extent in math achievement. The low and high-dose groups seemed to benefit from aerobic exercise to the same extent.

The pattern of brain activity of the children in the exercise groups also changed compared to the control group: Increased bilateral prefrontal cortex activity and decreased activity in bilateral posterior parietal cortex was observed.

Conclusions

Aerobic exercise seems to benefit overweight children not only physically but also mentally. These findings mirror the ones observed in the aging population. Aerobic exercise influences cognition through the increase of growth factors such as brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which leads to increased capillary blood supply to the brain and growth of both new neurons and synapses.

With childhood obesity on the rise, these are very timely findings. In addition, exercise is a simple solution to increase physical health and mental performance. Something to tell to your school board, over and over!

Related posts:

• Fitter bodies = fitter brains. True at all ages?
• Exercise as a Treatment for ADHD

Researchers had 70 people ages 60 to 83 perform a variety of tests to measure visuospatial memory, ability to name objects, the brain’s ability to adapt to new information […] those who had engaged in musical activity for 10 years or longer scored substantially better than those with no musical activity in their past.

the longer people play instruments, the more benefits they may derive.

All were amateurs who had started playing when they were 10 years old.

the relationship between cognitive skills and years of musical activity held up whether the musicians were currently involved in making music or not.

As the article points out this study shows an association between playing a musical instrument and cognitive skills, which doesn’t imply a causation effect. It is also not clear what in playing a musical instrument is good for the brain. However we know that professional musicians’ brains are different in some areas that non-professional musicians’ ones. This suggests that playing a musical instrument triggers neuroplastic changes in the brain. These changes seem to contribute to brain/cognitive reserve and be neuroprotective.

Related post: Neuroplasticity: the potential for lifelong brain development

Individuals with Alzheimer’s and matched controls were presented with unfamiliar songs lyrics: half of the lyrics were sung and half were merely spoken. Participants were then presented with the lyrics they had heard as well as with new ones, and asked whether they recognized any lyrics.

Alzheimer’s patients’ memory was much better for sung lyrics than for spoken ones. There was no difference between the two types of lyrics for the healthy older adults.

Why do people with Alzheimer’s seem to benefit from musical stimuli? The authors of the study suggest that this is because music is processed more broadly in the brain than non-musical information. Moreover some areas in this network are only slowly affected by the disease:

Music processing encompasses a complex neural network that recruits from all areas of the brain, including subcortical areas such as the basal ganglia […] and cortical areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex  and orbitofrontal cortex that are affected at a slower rate in AD compared to the areas of the brain typically associated with memory.

It is also possible that musical information increases arousal and thus sharpens attention, which would benefit Alzheimer’s patients who have trouble focusing.

These results may have many practical applications: Musical mnemonics may be used by caregivers to teach crucial new information to people suffering from Alzheimer’s, such as a phone number or when to take a pill. Using known songs to present the information may help individuals register it more easily, which is very encouraging and easy to do.

Related posts on music and the brain:

• Music: Another Pillar of Brain Fitness?
• Our Brain on Music: We need to do more than listen