SharpBrains

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.

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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.

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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 Continue Reading »

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.