You know your weight. And your physical fitness. And a variety of health-related metrics.
What about your brain fitness?
Two recent announcements bring out how the assessment of cognitive abilities, or brain functions, is increasingly being done thanks to new computerized options:
1) Last week, OptumHealth announced an exclusive 3-year agreement (estimated at $18m) with the Australian company Brain Resource. OptumHealth will be embedding the Brain Resource platform into their overall Behavioral Solutions program.
- OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions will work with Brain Resource to provide clinicians with a Web-based assessment that measures general cognition (how people process information) and social cognition (how people manage their emotions). This 40-minute assessment is based on well-known and validated tests of memory, attention, executive function, and response speed, and mood, social skills and emotional resilience.
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Can exercise make you smarter? It can.
Is it the only thing that can? Keep reading...
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Physical Exercise and Brain Health
- By Dr. Pascale Michelon
Have you heard of or read John Ratey's book “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain
”? According to Harvard Psychiatry Professor John Ratey nothing beats exercise for promoting brain heath.
I am sure you have also heard that exercising your mind promotes brain health.
What is the connection between physical and mental exercises? Do they have additive effects on brain health? Are they redundant?
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A few colleagues referred me over the weekend to a very nice article at business publication Portfolio.
While the article does an excellent job at introducing the reader to the concept and promise of computerized cognitive assessments, it also contributes to the mythology of "Brain Age". 
Let's first take a look at the article How Smart Are You: The business of assessing cognition and memory is moving from testing brain-impaired patients to assessing healthy peoples' brains online.
A couple of quotes:
- "Cognitive Drug Research is one a handful of businesses, most of them outside of the U.S., that work with pharmaceutical companies to test how new drugs for everything from nicotine addiction to Alzheimer’s disease affect the mind’s ability to remember things, make decisions, and analyze information."
- "Cognitive tests have been around for a century as examinations taken with paper and pencil. In the 1970s and '80s the tests shifted to computers, Cognitive Drug Research founder Keith Wesnes says.
So far, so good. In fact, one of the key highlights from the market report we released in March was that "Large-scale, fully-automated cognitive assessments are being used in a growing number of clinical trials. This opens the way for the development of inexpensive consumer-facing, baseline cognitive assessments." And we profiled a few leading companies in the space: Brain Resource Company, Cognitive Drug Research, CNS Vital Signs and CogState.
Now, the article is accompanied by a 5-7 minute quick test that promises to give us our "Brain Age". And this doesn't come from Nintendo, but from Cognitive Drug Research, a respected science-based company.
You can check it out Continue Reading »
After many months of work (and we hope many new neurons and stronger synapses in our brains), we have just released our inaugural report on the emerging Brain Fitness Software Market, 
the first to define the brain fitness software market and analyze the size and trends of its four customer segments. We estimate the size of the US brain fitness software market at $225M in2007, up from $100m in 2005 (50% CAGR). The two segments that fueled the market growth: consumers (grew from $5m to $80m, 300% CAGR) and healthcare & insurance providers (grew from $36m to $65m, 35% CAGR).
Highlights from The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 report include:
1) 2007 was a seminal year for the US Brain Fitness software market, which reached $225 million in revenues – up from an estimated $100 million in 2005.
2) Over 20 companies are offering tools to assess and train cognitive skills to four customer segments: consumers; healthcare and insurance providers; K12 school systems; and Fortune 1000 companies, the military, and sports teams.
3) The Nintendo Brain Age phenomenon has driven much of the growth. The consumer segment grew from a few million in 2005 to an estimated $80 million in 2007.
4) There is major confusion in the market, so education will be key. Users and buyers need help to navigate the maze of products and claims.
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Given the current political climate, we are pleased to host this thought-provoking article by 2 of our Expert Contributors. Dear Mr or Mrs Next President: how can you help our minds take better care of our brains?
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Ask Not What The Health System Can Do For You...
-- By Simon J. Evans, PhD and Paul R. Burghardt, PhD.
With the presidential debates gearing up again we are sure to hear more about health care. But we propose a slightly different question. In addition to asking how we can get more people healthcare coverage, we should also ask why so many people are sick in the first place.
The words of John Kennedy might today be, “Ask not what the health care system can do for you. Ask what you can do to reduce the health care burden”. But before delving into what we can do, let’s take a look at some realities that our next president could face in their first ‘State of the Union’ address.
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Cognitive training (the basis for what we call "brain fitness" these days) has a wide array of applications. The most recent
one, which is capturing public's imagination, monopolizing media coverage, and creating certain confusion, is Healthy Brain Aging. We are fortunate to have Dr. Joshua Steinerman, one of our new Expert Contributors, offer today his great voice to this conversation. Enjoy!
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Minding the Aging Brain
-- By Joshua R. Steinerman, M.D.
Scientists, philosophers, artists, and experts from all fields of human endeavor lament: it ain’t easy getting older. It? Do they refer to frailty and disability? To bodily disease? To life at its essence?
It’s all in your head
The mind is not set in stone, but it is encased by bone. It’s really all about the brain, the hyphen in the mind-body conundrum. That squishy gray neuronal jungle is the interface between internal life and environmental sensations and stimulation. As expected, the brain shows signs of aging just as a wrinkled brow, a stooped posture, or an arthritic finger might. The most common brain changes observed in aging and in age-associated neuropsychiatric disease include:
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Today we have the pleasure to have Dr. Pascale Michelon, one of our new Expert Contributors, write her first article here. Enjoy, and please comment so we hear your thoughts and engage in a nice conversation.
(Btw, if you notice some similarity between the colors in the fMRI scan below and the look & feel of this site...well, the reason is that those orange-grey fMRI colors were our inspiration! the orange color denotes the most brain activation).
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You have probably heard about CAT and MRI scans (produced thanks to machines like the one to the top right). So you know that these are techniques that doctors and scientists use to look inside the brain.
You have probably also heard about brain fitness and how important it is to keep a healthy brain to be protected against age-related and disease-related brain damages.
The question we ask here is the following: Can we use brain scans to evaluate how fit the brain is? Before we try to answer this question let’s start with the basics and try to understand how brain scans work.
Brain imaging, also called neuroimaging, allows one to Continue Reading »
Nice combination today, of article and brain teaser (thanks Ellen!).
1- Brain Teaser: Try this quick game and test your peripheral vision, visual short-term memory and hand-eye coordination.
When all the numbered red squares are visible, try to get rid of them as fast as you can, in numerical order. You don't have to click them... just touch them with the cursor. To start, click here.
2- Article: Exercising your brain power, The News Journal, DE. "Like your muscles, your mind needs regular workouts to remain in top shape as you age, but don't sweat it --- it can be easy and fun"
3- If you like it, you may consider a more rigorous and personalized Brain Workout program to train 14 cognitive skills.
