We offered some Brain Fitness Predictions in our Market Report , including…

“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 Read the rest of this entry »

A quick note to alert you of two very interesting, growing, and somehow linked debates:

1) Very insightful article on The Aging of the Baby Boomers: What Does It Mean for the Legal Profession (thank you, Stephanie!). Some quotes:

- “As I pen this article, it seems as though I’m writing about someone else—the older worker. Age and aging, it seems, are in the eye of the one looking back at you in the mirror. I have this theory, especially as it pertains to men, that when we look in the mirror, we still see that 20 year-old stud who can leap tall buildings. But I know that my vertical leap is not what it used to be. The reality of aging in the legal profession is upon me and those of our generation.”

- “Also, the perception of how old is old varies depending on the job or profession. For example, Read the rest of this entry »

Today we will continue our review of the benefits of brain training for specific occupations: in this case, pilots and basketball players. The lessons can be relevant not only for corporate training but also for education and brain health & wellness.

To do so, we will select quotes from our interview last year with one of the major scientists in the field of cognitive simulations, Professor Daniel Gopher. You can read the full interview here.

Prof. Gopher published an award-winning article in 1994, Gopher, D., Weil, M. and Baraket, T. (1994), Transfer of skill from a computer game trainer to flight, Human Factors 36, 1–19., that constitutes a key milestone in the cognitive engineering field.

On Cognitive Training and Cognitive Simulations

AF: Tell us a bit about your overall research interests

DG: 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 Read the rest of this entry »