In April 2008, Bay­crest, a lead­ing research insti­tute focused on aging and brain func­tion, received $10-million from the Ontario Gov­ern­ment to cre­ate a ground­break­ing Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness. Its stated goal was to “develop and com­mer­cial­ize a range of prod­ucts designed to improve the brain health of aging Ontar­i­ans and oth­ers around the world”.

“Our gov­ern­ment is proud to sup­port Bay­crest and its invalu­able work, which is already lead­ing to the dis­cov­ery of impor­tant new tools and approaches to treat­ing brain dis­eases asso­ci­ated with aging,” said Min­is­ter of Research and Inno­va­tion, John Wilkinson.

We have Baycrest’s CEO with us today, to explore why Ontario and Bay­crest chose to become pio­neers in this area, and dis­cuss some of the main oppor­tu­ni­ties, and chal­lenges. Dr. William E. Reich­man is Pres­i­dent and CEO of Bay­crest. Dr. Reich­man, an internationally-known expert in geri­atric men­tal health and demen­tia, is also Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try on the Fac­ulty of Med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Bill, thank you for your time. Let me start by ask­ing, given that you just spoke at the recent Con­sumer Elec­tronic Show, what do you make of the grow­ing brain fit­ness field?

Bill Reich­man: it looks like a clas­sic exam­ple of a very promis­ing but still early stage field – a lot of oppor­tu­nity and enthu­si­asm, but also a lot of prod­uct claims that are not backed by solid research. Think about the phys­i­cal fit­ness anal­ogy: even today, after decades of progress, you still see peo­ple buy­ing research-based prod­ucts such as tread­mills but also all types of ran­dom machines they see on TV and have not been sub­ject to any val­i­da­tion. Sim­i­larly, con­sumers today do not know what to make of grow­ing brain fit­ness claims. As another speaker pointed out, for the indus­try to ful­fill its promise, it will need to be care­ful with research and claims, not to end up like the nutraceu­ti­cals category.

By the way, let me rec­og­nize that the work you are doing with Sharp­Brains reports and your web­site is very impor­tant to offer qual­ity information.

Thank you. Let’s step back for a moment. Tak­ing a, say, 10 years view, what is the main oppor­tu­nity that technology-based brain fit­ness can offer to society?

First of all, let me say that I think we have an oppor­tu­nity to make major progress in Brain Health in the XXI cen­tury, sim­i­lar to what hap­pened with Car­dio­vas­cu­lar Health in the XX, and tech­nol­ogy will play a cru­cial role.

Given the rapid advances we are wit­ness­ing today in the research and tech­nol­ogy are­nas, I feel con­fi­dent in say­ing that in less than 10 years we will have both valid and reli­able assess­ments of cog­ni­tive func­tions, that will be used both by Read the rest of this entry »

Fyi, I will be speak­ing at the fol­low­ing events:

» March 5th, New York Acad­emy of Med­i­cine, NYC. I will present Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware — Con­sumers Guide to dis­tin­guish­ing hope from hype, at the Com­pre­hen­sive Approach to Demen­tia Sym­po­sium spon­sored by Mon­te­fiore Med­ical Cen­ter and with credit des­ig­nated by Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine.

» March 15-19th, ASA/ NCOA annual con­fer­ence in Las Vegas. I will be pre­sent­ing two ses­sions. Reg­is­tra­tion is open now at 2009 Aging in Amer­ica Con­fer­ence, but there is lim­ited infor­ma­tion on the ses­sions. Will blog when there are detailed abstracts available.

- The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket, 16-Mar-09, 08:00 PM — 09:30 AM

- Brain Fit­ness in Senior Hous­ing: 18-Mar-09, 11:30 AM — 12:30 PM

» April 8th, Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina Greens­boro: Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness and the Aging Work­force: Oppor­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges, at the Sil­ver­ing Work­force Summit.

A spate of recent news cov­er­age on brain fit­ness and “brain train­ing” reflects a grow­ing inter­est in nat­ural, non-drug-based inter­ven­tions to keep our brains sharp as we age. This inter­est is very timely, given the aging pop­u­la­tion, increas­ing Alzheimer’s rates, and soar­ing health care costs that place more empha­sis than ever on pre­ven­tion and chang­ing lifestyle.

This past Tues­day, the MIT Club of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and Smart­Sil­vers spon­sored an event on The Emerg­ing Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket: Build­ing Bet­ter Brains to explore the real­i­ties and myths of this grow­ing field. The panel was mod­er­ated by Zack Lynch, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Indus­try Orga­ni­za­tion, and com­posed of a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and 3 CEOs of pro­gram devel­op­ers in the field. Before the panel, I had the chance to present an overview of the state of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket based on our upcom­ing report to be released on March 4th.

Why are we talk­ing about this field at all? Well, for one, an increas­ing num­ber of com­pa­nies are achiev­ing sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial suc­cess in pack­ag­ing “brain exer­cise”. An exam­ple is the line of Nin­tendo games, such as Brain Age and Brain Train­ing, that have shipped over 15 mil­lion units world­wide despite lim­ited sci­en­tific sup­port, since 2005. What is less vis­i­ble is that a num­ber of com­pa­nies and sci­en­tists are Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are for­tu­nate to inter­view Dr. Jerri Edwards, an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­sity of South Florida’s School of Aging Stud­ies and Co-Investigator of the influ­en­cial ACTIVE study. Dr. Edwards was trained by Dr. Kar­lene K. Ball, and her research is aimed toward dis­cov­er­ing how cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties can be main­tained and even enhanced with advanc­ing age.

Main focus of research

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Please explain to our read­ers your main research areas

Jerri Edwards: I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions may help older adults to avoid or at least delay func­tional dif­fi­cul­ties and thereby main­tain their inde­pen­dence longer. Much of my work has focused on the func­tional abil­ity of dri­ving includ­ing assess­ing dri­ving fit­ness among older adults and reme­di­a­tion of cog­ni­tive decline that results in dri­ving difficulties.

Some research ques­tions that inter­est me include, how can we main­tain health­ier lives longer? How can train­ing improve cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, both to improve those abil­i­ties and also to slow-down, or delay, cog­ni­tive decline? The spe­cific cog­ni­tive abil­ity that I have stud­ied the most is pro­cess­ing speed, which is one of the cog­ni­tive skills that decline early on as we age.

ACTIVE results

Can you explain what cog­ni­tive pro­cess­ing speed is, and why it is rel­e­vant to our daily lives?

Pro­cess­ing speed is men­tal quick­ness. Just like a com­puter with a 486 proces­sor can do a lot of the same things as a com­puter with a Pen­tium 4 proces­sor, but it takes much longer, our minds tend to slow down with age as com­pared to when we were younger. We can do the same tasks, but it takes more time. Quick speed of pro­cess­ing is impor­tant for Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of recent news…let’s con­nect some dots

1) Great arti­cle titled Boom time for retirees (Finan­cial Times)

- “By 2015, boomers will have a net worth of some $26,000bn (£12,750bn, ¬17,670bn)  equiv­a­lent to a year’s gross domes­tic prod­uct for the US and euro­zone com­bined. They will con­trol a larger pro­por­tion of wealth, income and con­sump­tion than any other gen­er­a­tion in the coun­try  the first time that con­sumers over 50 have held such sway over the world’s largest economy.”

- “But as the boomers aged by 2015 they will all be out­side the fabled under-49 cohort  cor­po­rate Amer­ica failed to grow old with them. Mar­ket­ing experts argue that the con­tin­ued focus of large com­pa­nies such as P&G and Gap on the youth of  “gen­er­a­tion and “gen­er­a­tion” over­looks a sim­ple sta­tis­tic: the 18–49 age group will grow by only 1m peo­ple in the next 10 years, com­pared with the 22.5m Amer­i­cans set to enter the 50-plus bracket.”

- “The last thing the [boomer] gen­er­a­tion needs is a com­pany that tells them they need tools to address their lack of dex­ter­ity, he says. “They don’t want geri­atric tools, they want cool stuff.

Main take-way: baby boomers are always “awake” and rein­vent­ing things…companies, adver­tis­ers, time to wake-up!

Full arti­cle: Boom time for retirees

2) The arti­cle is based upon this excel­lent McK­in­sey report Read the rest of this entry »

(Thanks for the lead, Tom!)

David Brooks writes a great col­umn (requires sub­scrip­tion) in the NYT titled A Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son. He expands the usual restricted under­stand­ing of “edu­ca­tion” to incor­po­rate a wider sense of “learn­ing”, by discussing

1. Where

• “The cre­ative ones (politi­cians) will finally absorb the truth found in decades of research: the rela­tion­ships chil­dren have out­side school shape their per­for­mance inside the school.”