Some very interesting brain fitness software market news:

1) Scientific Learning To Buy Out Soliloquy

- “Scientific Learning Corp. has announced that it will acquire Soliloquy Learning from JTT Holdings. Both Scientific Learning and Soliloquy provide technology solutions for education. The acquisition will cost SLC about $11 million and is expected to be completed this month.”

- “Scientific Learning is the developer of Fast ForWord, a family of reading intervention tools targeted toward students who are characterized as struggling learners and designed to develop the required “neurocognitive skills” for reading and learning in general. Soliloquy is also a reading intervention developer.”

Comment: this acquisition consolidates Scientific Learning (NSDQ: SCIL) as the leading company in the education segment of the brain fitness market. It will be interesting to track what research gets done on the neural and cognitive effects of Soliloquy, since Scientific Learning’s Fast Forword is backed by extensive literature.

2) Technomedia Partners With SBT to Accelerate Its International Expansion

- “Technomedia, a Canadian provider of talent management and human capital development solutions, announced its partnership with the SBT (Scientific Brain Training) group, a European provider of training and evaluation of cognitive functions.” Read the rest of this entry »

We have explained before how mental stimulation is important if done in the right supportive and engaging environment. Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky and others have shown that chronic stress and cortical inhibition, which may be aggravated due to imposed mental stimulation, may prove counterproductive. Having the right motivation is essential.

A promising area of scientific inquiry for stress management is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). You may have read about it in Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. An increasing number of neuroscientists (such as UMass Medical School’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Richard Davidson) have been investigating the ability of trained meditators to develop and sustain attention and visualizations and to work positively with powerful emotional states and stress through the directed mental processes of meditation practices. And have put their research into practice for the benefit of many hospital patients through their MSBR programs.

A Stanford psychologist and friend recently alerted me to a similar program organized Read the rest of this entry »