Next Tuesday, November 3rd: I’ll be presenting the SharpBrains Guide to a business/ entrepreneurial audience at the San Francisco Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (you can register online).

Description: While most of us have heard the phrase “use it or lose it,” very few understand what “it” means, or how to properly “use it” in order to improve brain function and fitness. This talk will provide an overview of the most recent research, guidelines and resources to “Use It and Improve It”, summarizing the main findings and topics from the new book The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness. We will debunk 10 common brain fitness myths; discuss how the brain works and the 4 pillars of brain maintenance; explain the difference between mental exercise and mental activity and identify practical ways to integrate this research into our work and lives for maximum brain health and performance.

To order book: Here. (has been among Amazon.com’s Top 10 Preventive Medicine books basically since publication!)

Over the last few weeks I have given a couple of AARP-sponsored talks, both in English and in Spanish (this was my first Spanish presentation on a topic I mostly discuss in English, so I did get some extra brain points by trying to translate “neuroplasticity” and “hippocampus” on the fly), and had a great couple of meetings with AARP staff to explore collaborations. AARP can obviously play a major role in how rationally this whole category of “brain fitness” evolves.

Here you have a couple of my favorite recent media interviews:

4-minute Video interview on the Gilbert Guide:
Book Reveals Secrets Once Only Known to Scientists

30-minute radio interview on WMBR (MIT campus radio station):
Paradigm Shifts: Brain Fitness (mine is the second interview, starts around the middle)

Finally, a growing number of bloggers are reviewing the book. This is what they say:

• Is Your Brain a Couch Potato (Doc Gurley at SF Gate)
• Essential reference for brain fitness, cognitive health, neuroplasticity (Highlight Health)
• Fitbrains learn how to learn (Dr. Larry McCleary)
• Learn about cognitive functioning (Teen Health 411)
• A great dedication: to your Unique Brain, and Unique Mind (Play with your mind)
• Very valuable interviews (Nucleus Learning)
• Authoritative research and perspective (Greenstein Institute)

You can order The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness here.

You may be reading all about brain fitness and brain training. It seems every week brings a new barrage of articles and studies which often contradict what you read the month before: Does Gingko Biloba help delay Alzheimer’s Disease? Can physical exercise help you stay sharp as you age? Which computer-based “brain fitness programs”, if any, are worth your money?

All this coverage reflects very exciting scientific findings but also poses a key dilemma: How to become an informed lifelong learner and consumer when there are few and contradictory authoritative guidelines?

The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness (to be published in May 2009; $24.95) aims to fill that void. This guide is the result of over a year of extensive research including more than a hundred interviews with scientists, professionals and consumers, and a deep literature review. Below you have some of the main findings from our effort. The guide not only covers these aspects in more depth and offers practical guidance, but also includes 18 interviews with prominent scientists to help you understand the research better.

Can we introduce you to your Brain?

The Guide will start at the obvious starting point: The Human Brain. In order to make informed decisions about brain health, one needs to first understand the basic organization of the human brain and how it tends to change as we get older.

• The brain is composed of a number of regions serving distinct functions. Forget IQ: our life and productivity depend on a variety of brain functions, not just one.

• There is nothing inherently fixed in the trajectory of how brain functions evolve as we age. Your lifestyle, actions, and even thoughts, do matter.

The 4 Pillars of Brain Maintenance

Neuroplasticity is the lifelong capacity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stimulation of learning and experience. The latest scientific research shows that specific lifestyles and actions can, no matter our age, improve the health and level of functioning of our brains.

What factors seem to have the most influence? Read the rest of this entry »

Given the growing media coverage mentioning the terms Cognitive Reserve and Brain Reserve, you may be asking yourself, “What exactly is my Cognitive (or Brain) Reserve?”

The cognitive reserve hypothesis, tested in multiple studies, states that individuals with more cognitive reserve can experience more Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain (more plaques and tangles) without developing Alzheimer’s disease symptoms.

How does that work? Scientists are not sure but two possibilities are considered.
1. One is that more cognitive reserve means more brain reserve, that is more neurons and connections (synapses) between neurons. Individuals with more synapses would then have more synapses to lose before the critical threshold for Alzheimer’s Disease is reached.
2. Another possibility is that more cognitive reserve means more compensatory processes. The brain of individuals with more cognitive reserve would use more alternative networks to compensate for the damages caused by the pathology in previously used networks.

In a newly published study, Roe and colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis, used the number of years of education as a measure of cognitive reserve. Why years of education? Because previous studies have shown that people who have more education also exhibit a greater resistance to Alzheimer’s symptoms, even while pathological changes are occurring in the brain (see Bennett el al., 2003 or Roe, Xiong, et al., 2008).

Roe and her colleagues studied 198 individuals whose mean age was 67. Out of these 198 individuals, 161 were nondemented and 37 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

All the participants in the study took a Read the rest of this entry »

A very promising cognitive training study was presented last week by Helena Westerberg at the annual meeting of the CNS: Cognitive Neuroscience Society held in San Francisco, and Dr. David Rabiner brings us the highlights.

- Alvaro

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The study was conducted with a general adult population, rather than adults diagnosed with ADHD, as was the case in previous published working memory training studies,

The study was a randomized, controlled trial of working memory training conducted with 55 younger (20-30 years old) and 45 older (60-70 years old) adults. Participants were randomly assigned to receive 5 weeks of active Cogmed Working Memory Training or a placebo training intervention. In the active training group, the difficulty of the working memory training tasks continually adjusted to match the individual’s performance. As a result, individuals were consistently challenged to perform at their highest possible level. In the placebo training group, the difficulty level remained constant across the training period such that improvements in working memory were not expected to occur.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you read about the recent experiment where young chimps displayed amazing visual working memory capability, beating humans?

- You can watch a short video here.

- Lumos Labs has released a very fun game to test your own skills: try out this Chimp Game!

 

Also, some very good recent news articles:

1) Is it worth going to the mind gym? (New Scientist). This is one of the best articles we have read in a while (unfortunately requires subscription).

- “Birdwatching is the brainchild of San Francisco-based Lumos Labs, just one of the dozens of companies that have sprung up in recent months to cash in on the “brain-training” craze. Like most of its competitors, the theory behind …”

Comments: the article introduces readers to much of the research and scientists we discuss in our blog, such as Torkel Klingberg’s work and recent results from the IMPACT study. The article would have been even better had Daniel Gopher been interviewed on his work improving cognitive performance of military pilots and basketball players.

2) Innovation: Your Brain Needs Just as Much Exercise as Your Body (Fox Business Network)

- “The market, however, is still small. According to Alvaro Fernandez , who co-founded market research and consulting firm SharpBrains, which is focused solely on the field of brain fitness, in 2007 the market was valued at $225 million, which is up from $150 million in 2005. Fernandez thinks there’s potential for it to surge, reaching more than $2 billion by 2016.”

Comments:  Very good article. Those estimates refer to the whole brain fitness software market to assess and train cognitive skills, including Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Katz, a San Diego clinical psychologist with decades of experience helping ADD/ ADHD kids and adults, and former Board Member of CHADD, and I had a very good meeting with a few school superintendents on Saturday.

We discussed the research state-of-the-art, current ADD/ ADHD interventions and the future of prevention-driven interventions.

Some highlights from our talk:

- More and more researchers are coming to see that the label “Attention deficit” was probably not the most fortunate one. Kids and adults with ADD/ ADHD can pay attention, when they are engaged in certain tasks, so the underlying problem is not a deficit of attention.

- ADD/ ADHD is not a problem of knowing, but a problem of doing. The bottleneck may reside in executive functions such as so-called working memory. The problem is execution, internalized behavior, not conceptual knowledge.

- For more information on Executive functions, you can check the excellent review in the American Journal of Psychiatry, of Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg’s book The Executive Brain

- Working memory is the ability to hold different things on line and manipulate them in real time in order to solve a problem, complete a task…

- When asked if “working memory” and “short-term memory” are the same, Mark explained that they refer to similar concepts, if not the same, but that researchers stopped using the term “short-term” memory many years ago, to make it clear that it is an active, not passive, skill.  In fact, he added, maybe it should be called “working attention” rather than “working memory”.

- We discussed the fortunate trend that many schools are migrating towards a public health model in helping kids with learning disabilities and ADD/ ADHD, focusing on more prevention at early ages than on reactive interventions to major problems.

- Working memory can be trained by intensive and targeted Brain Fitness Programs supported by the use of computer-based programs, like RoboMemo, the program that I came to know last year after a great Scientific American article that mentioned their clinical study with kids with ADD/ ADHD, published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (See research here).

You can read more information on the science of Brain Fitness Programs.