We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play.

Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more “playful culture” in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.

- Alvaro

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Can We Play?

– By Dr. David Elkind

Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. More than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children’s time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Hofferth has also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure, not including watching television, has increased from 30 minutes to more than three hours. It is no surprise, then, that childhood obesity is now considered an epidemic.

But the problem goes well beyond obesity. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

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Very good article in the LA Times today. Like a StairMaster for the brain: Can mental workouts improve the mind’s agility? Baby boomer concerns stimulate an industry expansion.

The reporter, Melissa Healy, reviews the healthy aging segment in the Brain Fitness field. A few selected quotes:

- “There is plausibility, both biological and behavioral, to the claim that these may work,” says Molly Wagster, chief of the National Institute on Aging’s neuropsychology branch. “But it is still a situation of ‘buyer beware.’ ”

- “I see this as a new frontier of fitness overall,” says Alvaro Fernandez, founder and chief executive of the website SharpBrains .com, which tracks the business and science of brain-training. Americans already understand the value of physical fitness as a means of preserving the body’s proper function and preventing age-related diseases, says Fernandez. He predicts that cognitive fitness will become a goal to which Americans equally aspire as we learn more about aging and the brain.
- (Dr. Elkhonon) Goldberg, who provides scientific advice on the website http://www.sharpbrains.com/, says that as neuroscientists use imaging technologies to “see” the cellular changes that come with learning, he grows more confident that well-designed training programs can have discernible everyday effects in preserving or repairing the intellectual function of older adults. “This is shared hardware” that’s being changed in the brain, “and to the extent you somehow enhance it, that will have wide-ranging effects,” Goldberg says. “It provides a much more compelling raison d’être for this whole business.”

The article adds that “Americans this year are expected to invest $225 million in these programs — up from just $70 million in 2003 — in an effort to tune up the brain, strengthen the memory and forestall or reverse the cognitive slippage that often comes with age, psychiatric disease, stroke or medical treatments.”

Our breakdown for those 2007 US predictions are as follows: $80m for the Consumer segment, $60m in K12 Education, $50m in Clinical applications, and $35m in the Corporate segment. The Consumer segment, with a healthy aging value proposition, is the most recent one but the most rapidly growing.

Read the full article: Like a StairMaster for the brain.

PS: the article also says “In the last three years, these brainpower-boosting programs have proliferated, with names like MindFit, Happy Neuron, Brain Fitness and Lumosity.”.. if there are reporters reading this, please avoid future confusion by naming Posit Science’s program “Posit Science Brain Fitness Program 2.0″. Brain Fitness refers to the full category.