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.

We recently prepared a Directory of Web Sites as part of our  Resources section. You will find some gems here, in a variety of areas:

>> The Dana Foundation offers several excellent online resources:

- Brainy Kids Online offers children, teens, parents and teachers links to games, labs, education resources and lesson plans.

- BrainWeb: general information about the brain and current brain research, as well as links to validated sites related to more than 25 brain disorders.

- Brain Resources for Seniors provides older adults and their caretakers with links to sites related to brain health, education and general information.

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Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our 10 most Popular blog posts. (Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).

Hello, this is Andreas again, the MD/ PhD student in cognitive neuroscience and new summer intern here.

Cognitive/ brain health is finally getting more attention by Public officials. On June 10th the National Public Health Road Map to Maintaining Cognitive Health was released by the CDC and the Alzheimer’s Association. The authors propose a set of 44 actions to reach a lofty goal: To maintain or improve the cognitive performance of all adults. This is great timing, given all the research and media attention that this field is getting.

I want to share with you the 10 top actions proposed by this report:

1) To determine how diverse audiences think about cognitive health and its associations with lifestyle factors. This work has all-ready yielded in a phenomenal report on Baby boomers’ current opinion of Brain Health and Fitness.

2) To disseminate the latest science to increase public understanding of cognitive health and to dispel common misconceptions. The discovery of lifelong neuroplasticity and neurogenesis has given us a new positive view
upon the human brain – This is still a concept not many know of. “Use it or lose it” and “Use It and Get More of It” needs to reach all people. See this good overview on the topic.

3) Help people understand the connection between risk and protective factors and cognitive health. Protective factors are well summarized in this blog post on the results from the Macarthur study of successful aging.

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I was sent these links to a free online crossword puzzle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excellent computer-based brain fitness programs available, puzzles can still be good mental exercise … they are just not a complete workout for your whole brain.

Word games like crossword puzzles and SCRABBLE® exercise your lexical recall (memory for words that name things), attention, memory, and pattern recognition. They can help maintain your vocabulary and avoid the frustrating tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon that all of us experience from time to time. Sudoko is not a mathematics game in that you don’t actually manipulate the numbers as mathematical entities, but it is a pattern recognition game using symbols (numbers). A very legitimate reason to play casual games is that they can be social and fun – which is good for reducing stress.

The drawbacks to puzzles and games is that they are hard to calibrate to ensure increasing challenge, and they generally only exercise a limited number of brain functions.

So by all means, do puzzles if you enjoy them! But be sure to push yourself to keep finding harder ones that fall just short of frustrating you. Also, just as you cross train your voluntary muscles, be sure to cross train your mental muscles by balancing your workout with other types of mental work (motor coordination, auditory, working memory, planning, etc.). The computerized programs make it easier for you in the sense that they are individually calibrated for you to employ novelty, variety, challenge, and practice to exercise your brain more thoroughly in each session.

Further reading on language production, comprehension, and goofs:

• Language Production and Perception
• Wernicke’s Area: an area of the brain where the temporal and parietal lobes meet that is used in understanding and comprehending spoken language
• Broca’s Area: an area in the frontal lobe of the brain that is involved in language processing, speech production and comprehension
• The Language Production Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics