Bev­erly San­born, Vice Pres­i­dent of Pro­gram Devel­op­ment at Bel­mont Senior Liv­ing and sched­uled 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Speaker, could not finally speak at the Sum­mit (she was very well replaced by col­league Jeff DeBevec), but for­tu­nately we can share her thought­ful answers to the fol­low­ing four crit­i­cal questions.

1. How would you define “brain fit­ness” vs. “phys­i­cal fit­ness”?

Brain fit­ness and phys­i­cal fit­ness are inter­linked. Each enhances the other and both are essen­tial com­po­nents of suc­cess­ful aging. As we age, the abil­ity to cope with inex­orable chal­lenge to social-emotional-economic well-being is rooted in hav­ing a high level of men­tal alert­ness and a phys­i­cal body that func­tions effi­ciently. But fit­ness is not just a happy con­se­quence of a hardy gene pool. Fit­ness for both brain and brawn requires a com­mit­ted effort, a lot of stretch and sweat, and the con­stant push to reach beyond the com­fort zone. Read the rest of this entry »

After many many months of men­tal stim­u­la­tion, phys­i­cal exer­cise and the cer­tain need for stress man­age­ment… we have just announced the release of the The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2009 report, our sec­ond annual com­pre­hen­sive mar­ket analy­sis of the US mar­ket for com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive assess­ment and train­ing tools. In this report we esti­mate the size of the US brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket at $265M in 2008, up from $225M in 2007 (18% annual growth), and from $100m in 2005. Two seg­ments fuelled the mar­ket growth from 2007 to 2008: con­sumers (grew from $80m to $95m) and health­care & insur­ance providers (grew from $65m to $80m).

The 150-page report finds promis­ing research and ini­tia­tives to drive sig­nif­i­cant growth, com­bined with increased con­sumer con­fu­sion given aggres­sive mar­ket­ing claims and lack of edu­ca­tion and stan­dards. The report includes:
– The com­plete results of an exclu­sive Jan­u­ary 2009 Sur­vey with 2,000+ respon­dents
– A pro­pri­etary Mar­ket & Research Momen­tum Matrix to cat­e­go­rize 21 key ven­dors into four cat­e­gories
– 10 Research Exec­u­tive Briefs writ­ten by lead­ing sci­en­tists at promi­nent research labs
– An analy­sis of the level of clin­i­cal val­i­da­tion per prod­uct and cog­ni­tive domain

Top 10 High­lights from the report:

1) Con­sumers, seniors, com­mu­ni­ties and insur­ance providers drove year on year sus­tained growth, from $225m in 2007 to $265m in 2008. Rev­enues may reach between $1 bil­lion to $5 bil­lion by 2015, depend­ing on how impor­tant prob­lems (Pub­lic Aware­ness, Nav­i­gat­ing Claims, Research, Health Cul­ture, Lack of Assess­ment) are addressed.

2) Increased inter­est and con­fu­sion: 61% of respon­dents Strongly Agree with the state­ment Address­ing cog­ni­tive and brain health should be a health­care pri­or­ity. But, 65% Agree/Strongly Agree. I don’t really know what to expect from prod­ucts mak­ing brain claims.

3) Invest­ment in R&D seeds future growth: Land­mark invest­ments by insur­ance providers and government-funded research insti­tutes test­ing new brain fit­ness appli­ca­tions planted new seeds for future growth.

4) Becom­ing stan­dard in res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties: Over 700 res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties mostly Inde­pen­dent and Assisted Liv­ing facil­i­ties and CCRCs have installed com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing programs.

5) Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion: Con­sumers seem more sat­is­fied with computer-based prod­ucts than paper-based options. But, sat­is­fac­tion dif­fers by prod­uct. When asked I got real value for my money, results were as fol­lows: Lumosity.com (65% Agree), Puz­zle Books (60%), Posit Sci­ence (52%), Nin­tendo (51%) agreed. Posit Sci­ence (53% Agree) and Lumosity.com (51%) do bet­ter than Puz­zle Books (39%) and Nin­tendo (38%) at I have seen the results I wanted.

6) Assess­ments: Increas­ing adop­tion of computer-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments to base­line and track cog­ni­tive func­tions over time in mil­i­tary, sports, and clin­i­cal con­texts. The Alzheimer’s Foun­da­tion of Amer­ica now advo­cates for wide­spread cog­ni­tive screen­ings after 65–75.

7) Spe­cific com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing and videogames have been shown to improve brain func­tions, but the key ques­tions are, Which ones, and Who needs what when?

Aggres­sive mar­ket­ing claims are cre­at­ing con­fu­sion and skep­ti­cism, result­ing in a dis­tract­ing con­tro­versy between two mis­lead­ing extremes: (a) buy­ing prod­uct XYZ can reju­ve­nate your brain Y years or (b) those prod­ucts don’t work; just do one more cross­word puz­zle. The upcom­ing book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness aims to help con­sumers nav­i­gate these claims.

9) Devel­op­ers can be clas­si­fied into four groups, based on a pro­pri­etary Mar­ket and Research Momen­tum Matrix: Sharp­Brains finds 4 Lead­ers, 8 High Poten­tials, 3 Cross­words 2.0, and 6 Wait & See companies.

10) Increased dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion: Lead­ing com­pa­nies are bet­ter defin­ing their value propo­si­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels to reach spe­cific seg­ments such as retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, schools, or health­care providers.

Lead­ing researchers pre­pared 10 Research Exec­u­tive Briefs:
- Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man (Einstein-Monteore): Neu­ro­pro­tec­tion via cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties
– Dr. Jerri Edwards (South Florida): Assess­ments of dri­ving fit­ness
– Dr. Susanne Jaeggi and Dr. Mar­tin Buschkuehl (Bern, Michi­gan): Work­ing mem­ory train­ing and  intel­li­gence
– Dr. Torkel Kling­berg (Karolin­ska): Work­ing mem­ory train­ing, dopamine, and math
– Dr. Liz Zelin­ski (UC Davis): Audi­tory pro­cess­ing train­ing
– Dr. David Vance (UAB): Speed-of-processing train­ing
– Dr. Jerri Edwards (South Florida): Cog­ni­tive train­ing for healthy aging
– Dr. Daphne Bave­lier & Dr. Shawn Green (Rochester): Action videogames and atten­tional skills
– Dr. Arthur Kramer (Illi­nois): Strat­egy videogames and exec­u­tive func­tions
– Dr. Yaakov Stern (Colum­bia): The cog­ni­tive reserve and neu­roimag­ing
– Dr. David Rabiner (Duke): Objec­tive assess­ments for ADHD

Table of Contents

Edi­to­r­ial
Exec­u­tive Sum­mary
Chap­ter 1. Bird-Eye View of the Grow­ing Field
Chap­ter 2. Mar­ket Sur­vey on Beliefs, Atti­tudes, Pur­chase Habits
Chap­ter 3. The Emerg­ing Com­pet­i­tive Land­scape
Chap­ter 4. The Sci­ence for Brain Fit­ness and Cog­ni­tive Health
Chap­ter 5. Con­sumers  Adopt­ing Cross­words 2.0?
Chap­ter 6: Health­care and Insur­ance Providers — A Cul­ture of Cog­ni­tive Health
Chap­ter 7: K12 School Sys­tems– Ready for Change?
Chap­ter 8: Mil­i­tary, Sports Teams, Com­pa­nies,  Brain-Performance Link
Chap­ter 9: Future Direc­tions‚ Pro­jec­tions and Bottlenecks

Com­pa­nies pro­filed include: Advanced Brain Tech­nolo­gies, Applied Cog­ni­tive Engi­neer­ing, Brain Cen­ter Amer­ica, Brain Resource, CNS Vital Signs, Cogmed, Cogstate, Cog­niFit, Cog­ni­tive Drug Research, Dakim, Houghton Mif­flin, Learn­ing Enhance­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, Learn­ingRx, Lumos Labs, Mar­bles: The Brain Store, Nin­tendo, NovaV­i­sion, Posit Sci­ence, Sci­en­tific Brain Train­ing, Sci­en­tific Learn­ing, Trans­An­a­lyt­ics, vibrant­Brains, Vig­or­ous Mind, Viv­ity Labs.

More on the report by click­ing on The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2009.

There’s such a flood of very sig­nif­i­cant research stud­ies, edu­ca­tional resources and arti­cles related to brain health, it’s hard to keep track — even for us!

Let me intro­duce and quote some of the top Brain Health Stud­ies, Arti­cles and Resources pub­lished in March:

1) Cog­ni­tive Decline Begins In Late 20s, Study Sug­gests (Sci­ence Daily)

- “These pat­terns sug­gest that some types of men­tal flex­i­bil­ity decrease rel­a­tively early in adult­hood, but that how much knowl­edge one has, and the effec­tive­ness of inte­grat­ing it with one’s abil­i­ties, may increase through­out all of adult­hood if there are no patho­log­i­cal dis­eases,” Salt­house said.

- How­ever, Salt­house points out that there is a great deal of vari­ance from per­son to person

2) Cere­brum 2009: Emerg­ing Ideas in Brain Sci­ence — new book by the Dana Foun­da­tion that “explores the cut­ting edge of brain research and its impli­ca­tions in our every­day lives, in lan­guage under­stand­able to the gen­eral reader.”

A cou­ple of excel­lent chap­ters of direct rel­e­vance to everyone’s brain health are:
– Chap­ter 4: A Road Paved by Rea­son, by Eliz­a­beth Nor­ton Lasley

- Chap­ter 10: Neural Health: Is It Facil­i­tated by Work Force Par­tic­i­pa­tion?, by Denise Park, Ph.D

3) Stay­ing Sharp DVD Pro­gram: “Dr. Jor­dan Graf­man, chief of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Sec­tion at the National Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke out­side of Wash­ing­ton, DC, and a mem­ber of the Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives, is your guide as we cover what to expect from the aging brain and what we can do to ‘stay sharp.’

For a free DVD of this pro­gram you can con­tact stayingsharp@dana.org. (they say free in their web­site, I don’t know if that includes ship­ping & handling)

4) Dri­vers to be tested on cog­ni­tive abil­ity start­ing at age 75 (Japan Times)

The out­line of a cog­ni­tive test that dri­vers aged 75 or over will be required to take from June when renew­ing their licenses was released Thursday…The test is intended to reduce the num­ber of traf­fic acci­dents involv­ing elderly dri­vers by mea­sur­ing their cog­ni­tive level.

5) Phys­i­cal Fit­ness Improves Spa­tial Mem­ory, Increases Size Of Brain Struc­ture (Sci­ence Daily)

- “Now researchers have found that elderly adults who are more phys­i­cally fit tend to have big­ger hip­pocampi and bet­ter spa­tial mem­ory than those who are less fit.”

6) Brain Train­ers: A Work­out for the Mind (Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Mind)

“I recently tried out eight of the lat­est brain fit­ness pro­grams, train­ing with each for a week. The pro­grams ranged widely in focus, qual­ity and how fun they were to use. “Like phys­i­cal exer­cise equip­ment, a brain exer­cise pro­gram doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it, says Andrew J. Carle, direc­tor of the Pro­gram in Assisted Living/Senior Hous­ing Admin­is­tra­tion at George Mason Uni­ver­sity. And peo­ple tend not to use bor­ing equip­ment. “I remem­ber when Nor­dic­Track was the biggest thing out there. Every­one ran out and bought one, and 90 per­cent of them ended up as a clothes rack in the back of your bedroom.

The reporter used: Posit Science’s Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram Clas­sic, Hap­pyNeu­ron, Nin­tendo BrainAge, CogniFit’s MindFit/ Cog­niFit Per­sonal Coach, Lumos­ity, MyBrain­Trainer, Brain­Twister, Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Training.

7) The Lat­est in Men­tal Health: Work­ing Out at the ‘Brain Gym’ (Wall Street Journal)

- “Mar­shall Kahn, an 82-year-old fam­ily doc­tor in Fuller­ton, Calif., says he got such a boost from brain exer­cises he started doing at a “Nifty after Fifty” club that he decided to start see­ing patients again part-time. “Doing all the men­tal exer­cise,” he says, “I real­ized I’ve still got it.”

Debate Over Drugs For ADHD Reignites (Wash­ing­ton Post)

- “New data from a large fed­eral study have reignited a debate over the effec­tive­ness of long-term drug treat­ment of chil­dren with hyper­ac­tiv­ity or attention-deficit dis­or­der, and have drawn accu­sa­tions that some mem­bers of the research team have sought to play down evi­dence that med­ica­tions do lit­tle good beyond 24 months.”

- “The study also indi­cated that long-term use of the drugs can stunt children’s growth.”

Adap­tive train­ing leads to sus­tained enhance­ment of poor work­ing mem­ory in chil­dren (Devel­op­men­tal Science)

Abstract: Work­ing mem­ory plays a cru­cial role in sup­port­ing learn­ing, with poor progress in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics char­ac­ter­iz­ing chil­dren with low mem­ory skills. This study inves­ti­gated whether these prob­lems can be over­come by a train­ing pro­gram designed to boost work­ing mem­ory. Chil­dren with low work­ing mem­ory skills were assessed on mea­sures of work­ing mem­ory, IQ and aca­d­e­mic attain­ment before and after train­ing on either adap­tive or non-adaptive ver­sions of the pro­gram. Adap­tive train­ing that taxed work­ing mem­ory to its lim­its was asso­ci­ated with sub­stan­tial and sus­tained gains in work­ing mem­ory, with age-appropriate lev­els achieved by the major­ity of chil­dren. Math­e­mat­i­cal abil­ity also improved sig­nif­i­cantly 6 months fol­low­ing adap­tive train­ing. These find­ings indi­cate that com­mon impair­ments in work­ing mem­ory and asso­ci­ated learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties may be over­come with this behav­ioral treatment.

9) Brain cor­tex thin­ning linked to inher­ited depres­sion (Los Ange­les Times)

- “On aver­age, peo­ple with a fam­ily his­tory of depres­sion appear to have brains that are 28% thin­ner in the right cor­tex — the out­er­most layer of the brain — than those with no known fam­ily his­tory of the dis­ease. That cor­ti­cal thin­ning, said the researchers, is on a scale sim­i­lar to that seen in patients with Alzheimer’s dis­ease or schizophrenia.”

A beau­ti­ful ini­tia­tive, fea­tured in the New York Times today:
Com­ing Full Circle:

- “In a typ­i­cal Montes­sori class­room, teach­ers use category-sorting exer­cises to help young stu­dents see pat­terns and con­nec­tions. But the par­tic­i­pants in this group were mostly in their 80s and on the other side of the cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment curve. They are res­i­dents at an assisted-living facil­ity for peo­ple with demen­tia called Hearth­stone at the Esplanade, which has six other homes in New York State and Mass­a­chu­setts. Since July the res­i­dents have par­tic­i­pated in a full-time pro­gram of Montessori-based activ­i­ties designed for peo­ple with mem­ory deficiencies.”

- “A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion about peo­ple with demen­tia, Dr. Camp said, is that they no longer learn. But they do: res­i­dents learn to find their din­ing room table, for exam­ple, well after the onset of Alzheimer’s dis­ease. And because they no longer have the higher brain func­tion they had as adults, he rea­soned, they are well suited to Montessori.”

Full arti­cle: Com­ing Full Cir­cle.

Related posts:

- Alzheimer’s Risk and Pre­ven­tion: the Cog­ni­tive Reserve

- Your com­ments on cog­ni­tive train­ing, Posit Sci­ence, Alzheimer’s Aus­tralia, geron­tol­ogy, games

I have fallen behind on answer­ing a few excel­lent recent com­ments –on cog­ni­tive train­ing over­all, Posit Sci­ence and Alzheimer’s Aus­tralia, geron­tol­ogy and the brain, the value of videogames-, so let me address them here:

1) Nicks says (Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams For Seniors Hous­ing, Health­care and Insur­ance Providers: Eval­u­a­tion Checklist)

“This report is inter­est­ing and it addresses many very impor­tant ques­tions that cog­ni­tive neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists, such as myself have. I feel that many of the prod­ucts on the mar­ket now make claims which are gen­er­ally unsubstantiated.

I find it con­cern­ing that many of these pro­grammes have been mar­keted to tar­get older adults in par­tic­u­lar with­out mak­ing any spe­cific state­ment on whether the activ­i­ties are ben­e­fi­cial and have been sup­ported with empir­i­cal research.

i have recently con­ducted a cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tion study which used a large array of out­come mea­sures which focus on Read the rest of this entry »

I will be speak­ing at the these upcom­ing con­fer­ences: if you are attend­ing, please let me know!

» Boston, April 28th, 2008: Panel on Lat­est Brain Research Trends, at the Learn­ing and the Brain Conference.

» Boston, April 29th, 2008: New Devel­op­ments in Cog­ni­tive Retrain­ing Tech­nol­ogy, at the Inno­va­tion Institute.

» Bal­ti­more, May 9th, 2008:  The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket, at the Games for Health Summit.

» San Fran­cisco, May 15th, 2008: Cog­ni­tive and Emo­tional Train­ing (Brain Fit­ness) for Healthy Aging, at the Insti­tute on Aging’s sem­i­nar on Brain Health Accross the Lifespan.  

» San Jose, June 9th, 2008: Brain Fit­ness Trends and Assisted Liv­ing Com­mu­ni­ties, at the Cal­i­for­nia Assisted Liv­ing Asso­ci­a­tion Spring Conference.

Today we inter­view Dr. Arthur Lavin, Asso­ciate Clin­i­cal Pro­fes­sor of Pedi­atrics at Case West­ern School of Med­i­cine, pedi­a­tri­cian in pri­vate prac­tice, and one of the first providers of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing in the US (the pro­gram whose research we dis­cussed with Dr. Torkel Kling­berg and Dr. Bradley Gib­son). Dr. Lavin has a long stand­ing inter­est in technology-as evi­denced by Microsoft’s recog­ni­tion of his paper­less office– and in brain research and applications-he trained with esteemed Mel Levine from All Kinds of Minds-.

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Key take-aways:

- Schools today are not yet in a posi­tion to effec­tively help kids with cog­ni­tive issues deal with increas­ing cog­ni­tive demands.

- Work­ing Mem­ory is a cog­ni­tive skill fun­da­men­tal to plan­ning, sequenc­ing, and exe­cut­ing school-related work.

- Work­ing Mem­ory can be trained, as evi­denced by Dr. Lavin’s work, based on Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing, with kids who have atten­tion deficits.

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Con­text on cog­ni­tive fit­ness and schools

AF (Alvaro Fer­nan­dez): Dr. Lavin, thanks for being with us. It is not very com­mon for a pedi­a­tri­cian to have such an active inter­est in brain research and cog­ni­tive fit­ness. Can you explain the source of your interest?

AL (Arthur Lavin): Through­out my life I have been fas­ci­nated by how the mind works. Both from the research point of view and the prac­ti­cal one: how can sci­en­tists’ increas­ing knowl­edge improve kids’ lives? We now live in an truly excit­ing era in which solid sci­en­tific progress in neu­ro­science is at last cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve people’s actual cog­ni­tive func­tion. The progress Cogmed has achieved in cre­at­ing a pro­gram that can make great dif­fer­ences in the lives of chil­dren with atten­tion deficits is one of the most excit­ing recent devel­op­ments. My col­league Ms. Susan Glaser and I recently pub­lished two books: Who’s Boss: Mov­ing Fam­i­lies from Con­flict to Col­lab­o­ra­tion (Col­lab­o­ra­tion Press, 2006) and Baby & Tod­dler Sleep Solu­tions for Dum­mies (Wiley, 2007), so I not only see myself as a pedi­a­tri­cian but also an edu­ca­tor. I see par­ents in real need of guid­ance and sup­port. They usu­ally are both very skep­ti­cal, since Read the rest of this entry »