(Editor’s Note: given the growing media attention to three apparently separate worlds -cognitive enhancement via drugs, brain fitness training software, computerized neurocognitive assessments-, I found it refreshing to see our co-founder Elkhonon Goldberg introduce the topic of cognotropic drugs with an integrative perspective in the much updated new edition of his classic book, now titled The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes In A Complex World. Below goes an excerpt).

For many neuropsychologists, like myself, science is a labor of love, but seeing patients is bread and butter. Traditionally, the clinical contribution of neuropsychology has been mostly diagnostic, with precious little to offer patients by way of treatment. Neuropsychology is not the only clinical discipline for years consigned to helpless voyeurism. Every discipline concerned with cognition shares this humbling predicament. A psychiatrist treating a schizophrenic patient or a depressed patient finds him- or herself in a similar position. There are ample pharmacological tools to treat the patient’s psychosis or mood, but very few to treat the patient’s cognition. Even though psychiatrists increasingly recognize that cognitive impairment is often more debilitating in their patients than psychosis or mood disorder, traditionally, very little direct effort has been aimed at improving cognition.

A neurologist treating a patient recovering from the effects of head injury does not fare much better. There are adequate means to control the patient’s seizures but not his or her cognitive changes, despite the fact that cognitive impairment is usually far more debilitating than an occasional seizure. Society has been so preoccupied with saving lives, treating hallucinations, controlling seizures, and lifting depression that cognition (memory, attention, planning, problem solving) has been largely ignored. Granted, various neuroleptics, anticonvulsants, antidepressants, sedatives, and stimulants do have an effect on cognition, but it is an ancillary effect of a drug designed to treat something else.

Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias have been society’s wake-up call. Here, in the most affluent country in the most affluent of times, human minds were succumbing to decay before human bodies, a sharp challenge to the tacit popular belief that the “body is frail but soul is forever.” This provided an impetus for the development of an entirely new class of drugs, which can be termed familially as “cognotropic.” Their primary and explicit purpose is to improve cognition.

Since medical and public preoccupation with dementia focuses on memory, most of the pharmacological efforts have been directed at improving memory. At the time of this writing, a handful of drugs known as “Alzheimer’s drugs” or “memory enhancers” have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In reality, both designations are somewhat misleading. The drugs in question are Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of the slides I created recently for my talks, and it seems to be getting the point across.

Your answer?

The follow-up question: is your job and life more similar to the constant problem-solving and mental challenge of the cab driver, or to the routine or the bus driver?

Pascale wrote an excellent article on this, check it out: Brain Plasticity – How learning changes your brain.

Have a good Good Friday/ Passover/ holiday/ weekend!

Today we’ll discuss some of the cognitive implications of “always on” workplaces and lifestyles via a fascinating interview with Maggie Jackson, an award-winning author and journalist. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, describes the implications of our busy work and life environments and offers important reflections to help us thrive in them.

This is a 2-part interview conducted via e-mail: we will publish the continuation on Thursday March 12th.

Alvaro Fernandez: New York Times columnist David Brooks said last year that we live in a Cognitive Age, and encouraged readers to be aware of this change and try and adapt to the new reality. Can you explain the cognitive demands of today’s workplaces that weren’t there 30-40 years ago?

Maggie Jackson: Our workplaces have changed enormously in recent decades, and it’s easy to point to the Blackberry or the laptop as the sources of our culture of speed and overload and distraction. But it’s important to note first that our 24/7, fragmented work culture has deeper roots. With the first high-tech inventions, such as the cinema, phonograph, telegraph, rail, and car, came radical changes in human experience of time and space. Distance was shattered – long before email and red-eye flights. Telegraph operators – not online daters – experienced the first virtual love affairs, as evidenced by the 1890s novel Wired Love. Now, we wrestle with the effects of changes seeded long ago.

Today, the cognitive and physical demands on workers are steep. Consider 24/7 living. At great cost to our health, we operate in a sleepless, hurried world, ignoring cues of sun and season, the Industrial Age inventions of the weekend and vacation, and the rhythms of biology. We try to break the fetters of time – and live like perpetual motion machines. That’s one reason why we feel overloaded and stressed – conditions that are corrosive to problem-solving and clear thinking.

At the same time, our technologies allow us access to millions of information bites – producing an abundance of data that is both wondrous and dangerous. Unless we have the will, discipline and frameworks for turning this information into wisdom, we remain stuck on the surface of Read the rest of this entry »

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 recent CNN article explains well why a growing number of companies use brainteasers and logic puzzles of a type called “guesstimations” during job interviews:

- “Seemingly random questions like these have become commonplace in Silicon Valley and other tech outposts, where companies aren’t as interested in the correct answer to a tough question as they are in how a prospective employee might try to solve it. Since businesses today have to be able to react quickly to shifting market dynamics, they want more than engineers with high IQs and good college transcripts. They want people who can think on their feet.”

What are technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and consulting companies (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture…) looking for? They want employees with good so-called Executive Functions: problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, planning, working memory, decision-making, even emotional self-regulation (don’t try to solve one of these puzzles while being angry, or stressed out).

Want to try a few? Below you have our Top 7 Guesstimations/ Logic Puzzles for Brain Challenge:

Please try to GUESS the answers to the questions below based on your own logical approach. The goal is not to find out (or Google) the right answer, but to Read the rest of this entry »

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

——————–

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our January Newsletter received a good deal of feedback from many readers. Based on it, our new approach is to select the top 10 most important articles every other week. Please take a look at this first experiment, and let us know you feedback.

(Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our monthly newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this newsletter by email).

News and Events

Stress Management is Key Factor For Cognitive Fitness: a great cover story in US News & World Report, and an excellent article in Prevention Magazine that was highlighted on the Today Show this week, both feature the importance of Read the rest of this entry »

Today we host a very stimulating essay on the importance of problem-solving and encouraging complex game-playing for children’s complete “cognitive nutrition”. Enjoy!

——————–

Children’s Complex Thinking

– By Tom O’Brien and Christine Wallach

Pop over to your neighborhood school and visit some classrooms. Is what’s happening cognitively nutritive? That is, does it satisfy present needs and provide nourishment for the future health and development of children’s thinking?

Or is it punitive, with little concern for present nourishment and future health and development?

The Genevan psychologist and researcher Hermina Sinclair said, Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Robert Sylwester is an educator of educators, having received multiple awards during his long career as a master communicator of the implications of brain science research for education and learning. He is the author of several books and many journal articles, and member of our Scientific Advisory Board. His most recent book is The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (Corwin Press, 2007). He is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon.

I am honored to interview him today.

Alvaro Fernandez: Let’s start with that eternal source of debate. What do we know about the respective roles of genes and our environment in brain development?

Robert Sylwester: Genetic and environmental factors both contribute to brain maturation. Genetics probably play a stronger role in the early years, and the environment plays a stronger role in later years. Still the mother’s (environmental) use of drugs during the pregnancy could affect the genetics of fetal brain development, and some adult illnesses, such as Huntington’s Disease, are genetically triggered.

Nature and nurture both require the significant contributions of the other in most developmental and maintenance functions. We typically think of environmental factors as things that happen to us, over which we have little control.

Can’t our own decisions have an effect in our own brain development? For example, what if I choose a career in investment banking, vs. one in journalism or teaching?

We make our own career decisions in life, and most of us make a combination of good and bad decisions, which influence our brain’s maturation.

My father was very unusual in his career trajectory in that he worked at one place throughout his entire adult life, and died three months after he retired at 91. I’ve always thought that it’s a good idea to make a change every ten years or so and do something different – either within the same organization or to move to another one.

It’s just as good for organizations to have some staff turnover as it is for staff to move to new challenges. The time to leave one position for another is while you and your employer are Read the rest of this entry »

A misconception we encounter often is that “memory” is the only, or most important, “thing” that our brains do. And the only one we need to care for.

We have a variety of cognitive abilities, from attention to processing speed to problem-solving to emotional self-regulation to, yes, memory. (And more). Even memory is not one whole thing, but has different types and processes: working memory vs. long-term, auditory vs. visual, events vs. facts vs. skills.

I say this in the context of this article and video you may already have seen, where a young chimp displays amazing visual working memory capability, beating humans.

- Read insightful blog post here. Quote

“This study shows that chimps can memorize at a glance the numerals presented Read the rest of this entry »