"7. Doctors and pharmacists will help patients navigate through the overwhelming range of available products and interpret the results of cognitive assessments. This will require significant professional development efforts, given that most doctors today were trained under a very different understanding of the brain than the one we have today."

The American Medical News, a weekly newspaper for physicians published by the American Medical Association, just published an excellent article along those lines:

Steps to a nimble mind: Physical and mental exercise help keep the brain fit
-- Neuroscience is uncovering techniques to prevent cognitive decline.

A few quotes:

- It's an example that highlights a wave of new thinking about the importance of brain fitness.

- Until recently, conventional wisdom held that our brains were intractable, hard-wired computers. What we were born with was all we got. Age wore down memory and the ability to understand, and few interventions could reverse this process. But increasingly, evidence suggests that physical and mental exercise can alter specific brain regions, making radical improvements in cognitive function.

- With nearly 72 million Americans turning 65 over the next two decades, physicians need the tools to handle growing patient concerns about how to best maintain brain health. Armed with this new brand of science, frontline physicians will be better equipped to address the needs of aging baby boomers, already in the throes of the brain fitness revolution.

- "Encourage them to exercise the brain in novel and complex ways," he says.

Full article: here

One of the physicians quoted in the article is Gary J. Kennedy, MD, Director of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in NYC and a professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

To put the AMA article in better perspective for SharpBrains readers, we asked Dr. Kennedy a few follow-up questions. Below you have his questions.

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): Can you summarize how cognitive functions tend to evolve as we age?

Gary Kennedy (GK): As we age cognitive functions that rely on processing speed or reaction time decline, slow down.  Problem solving speed declines. This is in part the result of frayed neuronal insulation as the myelin sheath surrounding the axons wears thin with advanced age or illness. However it is possible to specialize and optimize some cognitive processes through experience, practice and planning. For example vocabulary can increase to age 90 provided there is ongoing stimulation and motivation to learn. And the growth and development of new brain cells can be augmented with the stimulating effects of physical exercise.

AF: Now, there are very significant cognitive differences among individuals of the same age, so age itself is not the main predictor. Can you explain what may be?

GK: Age also has the effect of amplifying differences between individuals. This is the result of variability in aging itself, freedom from or accumulation of illnesses and injury, and life style. The influence of genetics is largely exhausted by the 6 and 7^th decades of life which means that habitual activities and social relationships have a larger and larger impact resulting in greater and greater variability between individuals.

AF: Can you please explain the relationship between cognitive and emotional health (what we typically call "brain fitness")

GK: Cognitive health requires motivation to sustain it and motivation depends on emotion and social reinforcement. Emotional self-regulation is not simply self control. Rather it is the capacity to respond to an emotional stress without prolonged loss of equilibrium. And it is the capacity to modify emotional reactions to resonate with others in the environment. Thought and feeling when linked together can be a powerful stimulus for learning, both for better and for worse. A positive outlook with an active response style is more protective than a tendency toward negativism and withdrawal.

AF: What advice would you give to people who want to maintain their brain in top shape?

GK: Simply finding a partner for regular physical activity is one of the best prescriptions for improving brain function. Staying emotionally, intellectually and socially engaged is also good advice.  And the more the better. The brain is a muscle – use it or lose it.

AF: And what advice would you give to doctors and health professionals on how to help their patients?

Doctors and all health professionals need to know how to motivate their patients to make the changes in life style that will promote healthy aging. Small, meaningful changes are relatively easy to achieve if the professional simply asks. Two straightforward examples: “how often do you enjoy an alcoholic beverage?” and “how often do you get a half hour of physical activity, walking or exercising?” can help the older person to minimize alcohol and maximize exercise. Brief interventions work surprisingly well.

Related articles:

- Wellness Coaching for Brain Health and Fitness

- Build Your Cognitive Reserve-Yaakov Stern

Context: The Challenges of the Aging Society

The world is aging. This is occurring in two ways: through shifts in the age structure that will eventually lead to many more people reaching older ages than ever before, and through continued success in extending life. Less than 100 years ago, life expectancy was between 30 to 40 years. Today, close to 800 million citizens are 60 and over.

And aging in healthier ways. Aging has incorrectly been associated with decline and decay, when in fact many people live healthy into older ages. There has been a synchronous extension in life expectancy and quality of life - the average 65-year-old today is much healthier, physically and mentally, than the average 50-year-old of 100-150 years ago - when most existing institutions were envisioned and created.

Healthy life can be further extended with existing knowledge. The fact is the onset and progression of fatal and disabling diseases, disorders, and disability can be postponed using well-researched basic measures of public health, environmental and behavioural changes, and medical technology interventions. The same methods may be used to improve or maintain mental and physical functioning.

Our healthcare and retirement systems are on bankruptcy track - their premises are outdated. Existing institutions, policies and attitudes do not reflect the points outlined above, having been developed for a society that no longer exists. We need to get on the right track: aging populations represent potential resources that are currently untapped or underutilized.

The current disease-based research agenda compounds the problem: emerging biomedical research holds the promise of slowing down the biological processes of aging - thereby contributing to lower prevalence rates of a spectrum of diseases. Yet, given existing funding paradigms, there is not a well-integrated and funded research plan in place to drive the agenda.

Solution: Capturing the Longevity Dividend with a Healthy Aging Agenda

Getting our institutions and policies in the right track -given the growing extension of healthy life- can pay a series of economic, health, and other life course dividends. A course change can have a significant return on investment, and the absence of this course change will have a series of negative consequences globally. We need to capture the longevity dividend to benefit people of all ages, as well as older adults- stop thinking Burden, start thinking Human Capital to be maintained and deployed.

To capture this Longevity Dividend, we need to move the agenda forward in three complimentary areas:

1) Promote Healthy Lifestyles that help Maintain Physical and Cognitive Functional Abilities:

- Partner to Raise the Prevention Agenda: we need adopt a cross-sector life course approach to health promotion, engaging not only the health and insurance system but also the education system and the media sector. In healthcare, we need to integrate medical care and public health approaches to prevent and ameliorate chronic diseases and conditions - geriatric medicine offer a valuable template for health care redesign that would be beneficial for all.

- Invest in Lifelong Learning: investing in education at every point in the life course, encouraging life long learning.

2) Redesign Environments to Foster Health, Engagement and Financial Security:

- Redesign Retirement Policies: redesigning the current retirement paradigm through enhanced flexibility offers a win/ win/ win scenario - for employers, employees, and society at large.

- Provide opportunities for productive engagement: create new generative roles and a host of opportunities for productivity and engagement by elder adults. These would confer huge societal benefits on unmet global needs, and if designed correctly, will promote the health of an aging society. One example is the “experience corps” model.

- Redesign Cities: redesigning cities to support healthy aging and independence and engagement. One of the transitions that will take place is that a significant portion of future cohorts will live in cities. Hence, we need to create necessary environments and transportations that will accommodate this trend.

3) Develop an integrated Healthy Aging Research Agenda: the disease-specific model needs to be supplemented by advancing research design to slow the biological processes of aging. We need to raise and integrate resources to invest in research for innovation in new social experiments, retirement and pension policies that work, continuum of living circumstances that encourage living in place, development of enhancements that encourage physical and cognitive functioning, basic biological research on aging, all built on a strong social compact.

There are 2 promising areas to start moving this agenda forward:

1) Propose a new Millennium Development goal: Include these pressing issues as one of the Millennium Development Goals, optimizing a full healthy life course and harnessing the opportunities of an aging world, including building effective approaches.

2) Propose a Healthy Aging agenda for Global 2000 companies: in partnership with the appropriate Councils, suggest research-based practices and policies: - Health promotion in the work place.
- Flexible retirement policies.
- Defining new roles for older adults and civic engagement.
- Invest in life long learning.
- Develop new technologies, products and services for an underserved, and growing, market.

Now, your turn:  can you help define the challenges and outline the solutions?

In other words, Applied Cognitive Engineering (ACE) and USA Hockey have partnered to bring to market a cognitive simulation game to improve the performance of ice hockey players - similar to what  ACE has been offering to professional and amateur basketball players.

ACE has raised $2.5M, and ACE and USA Hockey have received a joint $800k development grant from the BIRD Foundation for the co-development of a training system for Ice Hockey players. (The article mentions SharpBrains' Market Report as a sign of how the market is growing, since we cover ACE).

For more context on cognitive simulations, you will enjoy this Interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher:

Alvaro Fernandez: Tell us a bit about your overall research interests.

Daniel Gopher: My main interest has been how to expand the limits of human attention, information processing and response capabilities which are critical in complex, real-time decision-making, high-demand tasks such as flying a military jet or playing professional basketball. Using a tennis analogy, my goal has been, and is, how to help develop many “Wimbledon”-like champions. Each with their own styles, but performing to their maximum capacity to succeed in their environments.

What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations” are the most effective and efficient way to do so.

This is an important point, so let me emphasize it. What we have discovered is that a key factor for an effective transfer from training environment to reality is that the training program ensures “Cognitive Fidelity”, this is, it should faithfully represent the mental demands that happen in the real world. Traditional approaches focus instead on physical fidelity, which may seem more intuitive, but less effective and harder to achieve. They are also less efficient, given costs involved in creating expensive physical simulators that faithfully replicate, let’s say, a whole military helicopter or just a significant part of it.

Executive Summary

A spate of recent global news coverage on brain fitness and brain training reflects a growing interest in natural, non drug-based interventions to keep our brains sharp as we age. This interest is very timely, given an aging population, increasing prevalence of Alzheimer’s rates, and soaring health care costs in the US that place more emphasis than ever on prevention and lifestyle changes.

US brain fitness market: significant and growing

We estimate the size of the US brain fitness market was $225m in 2007 – more than double what it was in 2005. Whereas K12 school systems were the largest buyers in 2005, consumers were responsible for most of the growth from 2005 to 2007. We estimate that the consumer segment grew from a few million in 2005 to $80m in 2007, and foresee significant market growth driven not only by consumers but also by healthcare and insurance providers.

Market dynamics

As we speak to diverse audiences about this emerging field around the country we are frequently asked the following questions:

- Why are we talking about the brain fitness field at all?

Over the past decade, teams backed by neuroscientists around the world from the U.S. to Japan, Israel, and Sweden have been developing brain fitness software products with commercial applications. Since 2005, the market for brain fitness software products has grown significantly. One of the companies that has perhaps done the most to spark the commercial adoption of brain fitness products is Nintendo with its Brain Age and Brain Training games. Nintendo has shipped millions of copies globally since its launch in 2005. Less visible is the growing number of developers that are bringing to market brain fitness products with more solid clinical validation.

- Who is buying these brain fitness software products?

We see four key customer segments purchasing commercialized brain fitness software products in the US: consumers (mostly adults over 50 looking for ways to protect their memory and prevent or delay dementia, as well as some younger adults); healthcare and insurance providers (ranging from hospitals to nursing homes and retirement communities seeking the latest treatments for their patients and members); K12 administrators (interested in applications that can help students with dyslexia and related learning difficulties); and Fortune 1000 companies, the military and sports teams (looking for advancements in productivity).

- Is there science behind the claims made by brain fitness software products? Do these products work?

It depends how “working” is defined. If “working” is defined as quantifiable short-term improvements after a number of weeks of systematic brain training to improve specific cognitive skills, then yes, a number of the brain fitness software programs do seem to work. If, on the other hand, “working” means measurable long-term benefits, such as better overall brain health as we age, or lower incidence of Alzheimer’s symptoms, then the answer is that circumstantial evidence suggests they may work. But, it is still too early to tell.

- What are the public policy implications?

Given the enormous benefits of widespread initiatives to help delay the onset of dementia in the aging US population, both in terms of quality of life for citizens and healthcare cost savings, the US government and healthcare community are watching these trends carefully. For example, the Center for Disease Control recently partnered with the Alzheimer’s Association to develop a comprehensive Cognitive Health roadmap to better guide research efforts and improve public education on the lifestyle habits that every proud owner of a brain could benefit from following.

Open questions

Since this is a new, rapidly growing field, we have many open questions about the industry, which will only be clarified with time:

- Will consumer behavior change to adopt preventive brain exercises that take more time and effort than swallowing a pill? If so, what is the profile of consumers who are most likely to change their lifestyle? Even if brain fitness has no side effects, will users show the commitment required to see results?

- How can consumers and executives assess which cognitive priorities require most attention and track progress due to brain training? Where can they turn for quality information and education to navigate through the emerging research and the overwhelming number of new programs – to separate the hype from the reality? In the absence of clear biomarkers, will cognitive assessments become commonplace as objective baselines?

- What business model and offering will succeed? Software product sales? Online subscriptions? Fun games with unproven brain benefits? Programs that improve the mental skills involved in specific activities, such as driving? Applications that help slow down the progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment to full-blown Alzheimer’s symptoms? Is this content-driven “edutainment”?

- Will therapeutic applications be regulated by the FDA?

- Will large-scale peer-reviewed research support a wider set of consumer applications?

Top three trends to watch: 2007-2015

What are some of the trends that anyone trying to understand this growing market should follow?

Here are some of our predictions that are expanded in Chapter 7:

- Brain fitness goes mainstream. An increased emphasis on brain fitness and maintenance will spread to retirement communities, gyms and health clubs. Will health clubs one day offer brain fitness programs, and perhaps “brain coaches” alongside rowing machines and step-masters? We think so.

- Leveraging better tools. Better and more widely available assessments of cognitive function will enable all of us to establish an objective baseline of how our minds are evolving, identify priorities for “workouts” and lifestyle interventions, and help us measure progress. Just as we find a variety of machines in health clubs today, in the future we can expect different programs tailored to train specific cognitive skills. New and improved computer-based brain fitness tools will come to market, and low tech options will also provide great value. There is more and more research on how meditation and cognitive therapy, to mention two examples, can be effective in literally rewiring parts of the brain.

- A growing ecosystem around those tools, including widespread incentives to use brain fitness products. For example, insurance companies will introduce incentives for members who want to follow brain fitness programs and companies will offer brain fitness training programs to attract and retain mature workers who want access to the best and the latest innovations to keep their minds sharp.

-----

The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008

-- Published March 11th, 2008 (click Here to learn more and acquire your copy) 

This 87-page report is the first to define the brain fitness software market, summarize the science behind brain plasticity and cognitive training, and analyze the size and trends of its four customer segments: consumers, healthcare & insurance providers, K12 school systems, and fortune 1000 companies, military, and sports teams.

The report tracks developments at over 20 public and private companies offering tools to assess and train brain functions and provides important industry data, insights and analysis to help investors, executives, entrepreneurs, and policy makers navigate the opportunities and risks of this rapidly growing market. The report discusses the implications of cognitive science on healthy aging and a number of disorders such as attention deficits, dyslexia, stroke and traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, autism, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease. The report also provides information and frameworks to help institutional buyers make informed purchase decisions about brain fitness programs.

Report Highlights
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Companies Included
End Notes
Endorsements

The companies included in the report are:

Advanced Brain Technologies

Applied Cognitive Engineering

Brain Resource Company

BrainTrain

CNS Vital Signs

Cogmed

CogniFit

Cognitive Drug Research

Cogstate

Dakim

Gemstone

Houghton Mifflin

Lexia Learning

Lumos Labs

MyBrainTrainer

Nintendo

NovaVision

Posit Science

Scientific Brain Training

Scientific Learning

TeachTown

You can click Here to learn more and acquire your copy. 

Issue: Retiring Employees, Lost Knowledge (Business Week)
A pilot program at American Express gives soon-to-be retirees less work and more time to pass along their expertise to younger generations

- "Before long, the group made an important discovery: Not only would a huge number of employees become eligible for retirement in the next five to 10 years, the company had done little to retain the wealth of institutional knowledge they would be taking with them. From the intricacies of key client relationships to mainframe computer languages no longer being taught in school, many experienced workers possessed critical know-how that, if lost, would be costly—if not impossible—for the company to replace."

- "These parameters helped shape the American Express phased-retirement program, an initiative launched in pilot mode during the first quarter of 2008. Rather than retiring and leaving the company at once, participants gradually give up their day-to-day responsibilities, while replacing some of their free time with activities like mentoring and teaching master classes to their successors. In addition, they get more time out of the office doing whatever they want—be it planning for life in retirement or doing charity work. The phased retiree continues to receive a portion of his previous salary, benefits as usual, and the company in turn gets to hold on to some of its most valuable employees a year or more past traditional retirement age."

Comment: beautiful initiative. For an increasing number of workers, there is no real hard reason why retirement must happen at some arbitrary date, be it 60 or 65. American Express is looking for a win/ win arrangement, including coverage of very important health benefits.

For context on how older workers can remain productive in areas where they have accumulated significant experience, let's revisit some of the notes of my recent conversation with researcher Art Kramer:

Alvaro Fernandez: In any case, your study reinforces an important point: older brains can, and do, learn new skills.

Art Kramer: Yes. The rate of learning by older adults may be slower, and they may benefit from more explicit instruction and technology training, but, as a society, it is a massive waste of talent not to ensure older adults remain active and productive.

Another recent study we conducted, this one still under review, is titled Experience-Based Mitigation of Age-Related Performance Declines: Evidence from Air Traffic Control. It deals with the question: “Can Age Itself Be an Obstacle for someone to perform as an Air Controller? And the Answer is: age itself, within the age range that we studied, is not an obstacle. Our results suggest that, given substantial accumulated experience, older adults can be quite capable of performing at high levels of proficiency on fast-paced demanding real-world tasks.

PS: reader Catherine just helped us see and fix a typo in this post...thank you, Catherine!

>> September 4-5th, San Francisco, CA: several Brain Health Promotion sessions, at the American Society on Aging conference.

>> October 9th, Vancouver, Canada: Exercising Our Brains 101 and Navigating The Brain Fitness Maze, at the British Columbia Seniors Living Association annual conference.

>> October 11th, San Jose, CA: The Science and Practice of Brain Fitness, at San Jose State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. (Information here).

>> October 23rd, Pocatello, Idaho: Cognitive and Emotional Training for Healthy Aging, at the Idaho Conference on Health Care. (Information here).

>> November 1st, Berkeley, CA: The Science and Practice of Brain Fitness, at UC-Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. (Information here).

>> November 7-9th, Dubai: Global Agenda Councils Inaugural Summit in Dubai, organized by the World Economic Forum. (Information here).

>> November 17th, New York City: The Emerging Brain Fitness Field: Research and Implications, at New York Public Library.

>> December 5th, San Antonio, Texas: The Emerging Brain Fitness Field: Overview of Research and Tools, at the International Council on Active Aging conference. (Information here).

As always, I will share the main take-aways via this blog. I hope to meet some of you down the road!

Playing Video Games Offers Learning Across Life Span, Say Studies
-- Skills Transfer to Classroom, Surgical Procedures, Scientific Thinking (press release).

Probably the most interesting study was that of 303 laparoscopic surgeons, which "showed that surgeons who played video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity and then performed a drill testing these skills were significantly faster at their first attempt and across all 10 trials than the surgeons who did not the play video games first."

The note goes further to explain the implications from this research:

"The big picture is that there are several dimensions on which games have effects, including the amount they are played, the content of each game, what you have to pay attention to on the screen, and how you control the motions," said Gentile. "This means that games are not "good' or bad,' but are powerful educational tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could."

Very thoughtful quote. Please note a few elements about the study and the quote itself:

- "video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity": meaning, that precise type of videogame. Other types may have other effects on cognition, depending on, as the note says, "the content of each game", defining content as what players need to do in order to succeed at the game.
- "laparoscopic surgeons": it is clear that these are important skills for a surgeon and not so important, say, for an economist. Perhaps more economists should be playing Age of Empires?

-  "are powerful educational tools": yes, and in fact that is the premise of the Serious Games field, but there also an unspoken factor here: efficiency. If the main goal is entertainment, then the more hours of fun, the better. If the goal is a functional outcome (cognitive or real-life), then one would want the intervention that works in the least amount of time. In other words, could a videogame be specifically designed for laparoscopic surgeons to improve the cognitive skills they need most for their jobs, and would that be more efficient than spending X amount of hours playing a variety of general games? Probably, as you can explore in this interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher on cognitive simulations.

For an in-depth market overview of Cognitive Training trends and companies, you can check out our Market Report.

Related articles:

- Cognitive Training: Interview with Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg

- Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not.

I recently reviewed Dr. Burton’s book on the Brain Science Podcast and last week I had the opportunity to interview him for the show. He explained that one of the origins for his book was his experience with patients with conditions like Cotard’s syndrome (where the patient thinks he is dead or does not exist). What Dr. Burton calls the “feeling of knowing” is so strong that people consistently trust it even when their beliefs contradict the evidence. At first it might seem surprising that this feeling is generated at an unconscious level in our brain, yet the same sort of processing creates the world we see and hear. It is well-known that what we see is not what enters our eyes, but rather a highly processed signal that is actually partly determined by our expectations. We can’t really control what we see, and similarly we do not have any conscious access to, or control over, the “feeling of knowing.” Keep that in mind then next time you can’t convince a friend to change their opinion.

One implication of this idea is that it argues for trying to be more tolerant of those whose beliefs are different from our own. However, it also has an important implication for brain health. Recently it is has become quite popular to tout programs that claim to improve one’s intuition or ability to access gut feelings. While it might be true that one can learn to become more aware of the emotional signals coming from one’s body, Dr. Burton argues that “gut feelings” or intuition should not be assumed to be true without testing.

This is difficult to accept because the emotional weight of the “feeling of knowing” tends to outweigh our attempts at logical reasoning. However by becoming aware that our intuitions and hunches are generated by the brain, we can also learn to subject them to the same scrutiny that we apply to optical illusions. We can’t control the “feeling of knowing,” but we can become aware of how it effects our behaviors and decisions.

Links:

- Brain Science Podcast #42: Dr. Campbell discusses On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton.

- Brain Science Podcast #43: Interview with Dr. Robert A Burton. (Note: a complete transcript of this interview is now available.)

- Robert Burton’s new book: On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not.

Ginger Campbell, MD graduated from the University of Alabama School of Medicine. She also has a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering and spent several years teaching at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dr. Campbell has been practicing emergency medicine since 1992. She started the Brain Science Podcast in 2006. Her goal is to help general audiences understand how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mysteries of how our brains make us who we are.

If interested in the topic on intuition vs. logic, you may also enjoy this related essay:

- To Think or to Blink?, by Madeleine Van Hecke.

Scott Spears, retired public schools superintendent.

His prediction: 

"Prediction 11: The notion of schooling will be structurally dramatically altered through the use of diagnostics related to the acquisition and improvement of basic cognitive skills (such as brain processing speed, attention, memory, and sequencing), along with prescriptions employing emerging brain fitness software exercises, beginning in the earliest grades and progressing through high school.

Schools will be structured around the acquisition of foundational cognitive skills, related physical fitness to support brain fitness, student awareness and knowledge of brain function and responsibility for one's own fitness. Schools will be much more organically structured along the learning needs of individuals, will be a community repository and asset for access to continuing brain and physical fitness programming, and will continue to provide important content knowledge acquisition experiences delivered through integrated experiential learning, custom-designed for the individual learner, and varying by time and place as needed.

Group learning gaps will close as the playing field levels in the acquisition of the basic cognitive skills required for high levels of success and learning. "Special education" as such will first disappear in the middle and later grades as students receive early intervention for cognitive skill development and as the plethora of currently diagnosed mental disorders are better understood as brain function issues that can either be prevented or remediated through neuroscience-based interventions, and will finally entirely disappear as a function of the design of individual learning plans for every student.

The nature of schooling is thus liberated from the current model of emphasis on content acquisition to become more focused on the teacher-student interface of interest-directed learning undergirded by the skills necessary for high-order thinking and learning."

When I contacted Scott to inquire about the main obstacles for this prediction to come true, he responded:

"The obstacles are many because this is such a disruptive, new technology that is difficult to explain to so many in education who have no "frame" beyond what they believe about teaching and learning from their undergraduate preparation."

Scott: many thanks for your thoughtful comment. We will mail you a hardcopy of our Market Report titled The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008. Looking forward to more of your contributions! 

Posts related to this prediction:

- Learning & The Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

- Brain Connection: Eric Jensen on Learning and the Brain

- Are Schools (Cognitively) Nutritive for Children's Complex Thinking?

The short of it…

As we age, our brain:

• still forms new brain cells
• can change its structure & function
• finds positive stress can be beneficial; negative stress can be detrimental
• can thrive on novel challenges
• needs to be exercised, just like our bodies

The long of it…

Adults may have a tendency to get set in their ways – I’ve been doing it this way for a long time and it works, so why change? Turns out, though, that change can be a way to keep aging brains healthy. At the April Learning & the Brain conference, the theme of which was neuroplasticity, I attended several sessions on adult learning. Here’s what the experts are saying.

CHANGE and EXERCISE

According to Kathleen Taylor & Annalee Lamoreaux, understanding that we have the ability to change our mental models, also known as epistemological change (a change in the way of knowing), will let us open the door to transformative learning (being willing to change and having an understanding of how to change). You can download the slides from their presentation here.

Learning something new outside our areas of expertise:

• keeps us fresh, which can add a spark to our teaching
• reminds us what it is like to be a student, which can help us empathize with our students
• exercises our mental muscles

Couple mental exercise with physical exercise, and you can improve general cognition and boost your creativity. Learn more about this from John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, which makes a compelling case that exercise is beneficial for cognitive health.

NEUROGENESIS

Our brains may be aging, but they are also continuing to develop. Neurogenesis is the process of forming new brain cells, and unlike what was previously thought, this process continues throughout life, as noted in this Society for Neuroscience brain brief on Adult Neurogenesis.

PLASTICITY

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to rewire itself. It empowers us to:

• fix damaged areas of our brains (as evidenced by the work of Edward Taub, Michael Merzenich, and Paul Bach-y-Rita, all mentioned in Doidge’s book, referenced below)
• continue to learn well into old age
• alter our behavior and performance over time

Norman Doidge writes extensively about plasticity in The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, and notes that “brain plasticity occurs in response to the environment, the task at hand, and our thoughts and imaginings.” Indeed, “in some cases, the faster you can imagine something, the faster you can do it.”

STRESS and EXERCISE

In his session on stress and neuroplasticity in learning, Bruce McEwen concurred with Doidge, noting that “structural plasticity in the adult brain is modulated by experience”. He went on to discuss the impact of stressful experiences on neuronal activity, delineating three types of stress:

1. positive, which consists of positive challenges

2. tolerable, which consists of adverse life events coupled with good social and emotional support

3. toxic, which consists of a sustained stress agent and a lack of social and emotional support Exercise, in addition to aiding cognition, can be beneficial in helping the brain and the body manage stress.

CHALLENGE and NOVELTY

Elkhonon Goldberg, neuroscientist and co-founder of SharpBrains, discussing Brain Plasticity and Cognitive Fitness, pointed out that “as we age, our expert knowledge remains strong, and our capacity for solving problems within our areas of expertise can often exceed that of those who are younger.” He further employed us to “turn neuroplasticity to your advantage” by:

• welcoming novel challenges

• beware of being on mental autopilot

• remain cognitively active

Goldberg elaborates on these points in his latest book, The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older.

Taken in sum, all of these ideas have me imagining professional development programs where teachers are encouraged to explore avenues outside of their expert areas. (More on that in a future post!) The combination of being a mentally and physically active lifelong learner isn’t just good modeling for younger brains; it’s also beneficial for us!

(Next post will consist of additional resources on these topics.)

Laurie Bartels writes the Neurons Firing blog to create for herself the "the graduate course I’d love to take if it existed as a program". She is the K-8 Computer Coordinator and Technology Training Coordinator at Rye Country Day School in Rye, New York. She is also the organizer of Digital Wave annual summer professional development, and a frequent attendee of Learning & The Brain conferences.

You will find more related information on how to improve concentration and memory by checking out these resources:

- Neuroscience Interview Series: interviews with over 15 brain scientists and experts.

- Collection of brain teasers and games: attention, memory, problem-solving, visual, and more.
- Brain Training Games and "Games": a 10-Question Checklist on how to evaluate programs that make brain-related claims.