Please Save these Dates if you are inter­ested in explor­ing and dis­cussing the lat­est on Opti­miz­ing Health Through Neuroplasticity-Driven Inno­va­tion; the theme for our third annual vir­tual Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (“vir­tual” means every­thing takes place online; no one has to travel):

• Pre-Summit work­shops: May 31st-June 1st, 2012
• Sum­mit: June 7-8th, 2012
• Expo Week: June 12-14th, 2012

17 Con­firmed Sum­mit Speak­ers include: Read the rest of this entry »

(You can learn more about the Sharp­Brains Coun­cil Here. If you par­tic­i­pated in the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit and want to join Coun­cil on a com­pli­men­tary basis before 01/31, please con­tact us.)

Dear Coun­cil Members,

First of all, have an excel­lent 2012. Here you have a few impor­tant updates, includ­ing our first con­fer­ence call in 2012: Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Short-Term Music Train­ing Enhances Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion.

Abstract: Researchers have designed train­ing meth­ods that can be used to improve men­tal health and to test the effi­cacy of edu­ca­tion pro­grams. How­ever, few stud­ies have demon­strated broad trans­fer from such train­ing to per­for­mance on untrained cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties. Here we report the effects of two inter­ac­tive com­put­er­ized train­ing pro­grams devel­oped for preschool chil­dren: one for music and one for visual art. After only 20 days of train­ing, Read the rest of this entry »

Sharp­Brains served a highly thought-provoking and infor­ma­tive 2011 Vir­tual Sum­mit on Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury over 3 days, March 30th — April 1st. Here is a brief dis­til­la­tion of the large num­ber (40+) of presentations.

1.The range and vari­ety of pre­sen­ta­tions left no room for doubt that the dig­i­tal brain health mar­ket is con­cerned with much more than improv­ing cog­ni­tive per­for­mance and preventing/treating dis­ease. There is a need for many tools in each of the fol­low­ing cat­e­gories: Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to make eleven impor­tant announce­ments about the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit…eleven addi­tional rea­sons to con­sider reg­is­ter­ing and join­ing our event and com­mu­nity next week.

1. Intel Cor­po­ra­tion, the “Spon­sors of Tomor­row™”, and Lumos Labs have become Sum­mit Gold Sponsors.
2. Sharp­Brains will issue a Cer­tifi­cate of Atten­dance to par­tic­i­pants (20 hours of con­tin­u­ing education).
3. Jamie Wil­son shares 20 rea­sons why vir­tual con­fer­ences are the future.
4. NIH/ NIA Pro­gram Chief Molly Wag­ster will dis­cuss the new NIH Tool­box for Assess­ment of Neu­ro­log­i­cal and Behav­ioral Function.
5. Yaakov Stern (Colum­bia), David Darby (CogState), Keith Wesnes (United BioSource) and Jef­frey Kaye (Orcat­ech) will explore The Role of Cog­ni­tive Health Mon­i­tor­ing Systems.
6. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (Sharp­Brains) and Muki Hansteen-Izora (Intel Cor­po­ra­tion) will ana­lyze The State of Inno­va­tion and Emerg­ing Marketplace.
7. You can still Reg­is­ter and obtain a com­pli­men­tary copy of Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket 2010 (which includes mar­ket data, ven­dor analy­sis, inno­va­tion case stud­ies, research briefs, and more.)
8. Michael Merzenich (UCSF), Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Har­vard), Wal­ter Green­leaf (Vir­tu­ally­Bet­ter) and Kate Sul­li­van (Wal­ter Reed) will dis­cuss how Inno­va­tion gets From Lab to Marketplace.
9. Lumos Labs, Brain Resource, Cogmed, Bay­crest, Cog­niFit, and Posit Sci­ence will present their lat­est tools and solu­tions dur­ing Expo Day.
10. A total of 19 excel­lent Sum­mit Part­ners help us expand Summit’s reach and influence.
11. We are plan­ning April/ May social gath­er­ings for Sum­mit par­tic­i­pants in 5 cities: San Fran­cisco, Los Ange­les, Wash­ing­ton DC, NYC, and Toronto, and will help facil­i­tate gath­er­ings in any city/ region with at least 10 Sum­mit participants.

Please visit the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit web­site to Learn More and Reg­is­ter.

Also, please fol­low us via Twit­ter and spread the word about the Sum­mit using hash­tag #svs11

We look for­ward to “meet­ing” many of you next week! Please remem­ber you can enter dis­count code sharp2011 in order to get 15% off reg­is­tra­tion fees.

The 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (March 30 — April 1st) is just 5 weeks away. You can Learn More and Reg­is­ter Today HERE. Don’t miss the oppor­tu­nity to join an incred­i­ble line-up of 36+ con­firmed Speak­ers, 7 Sponsors/ Exhibitors, 13 Part­ners, and 150+ Par­tic­i­pants as of today, all avail­able to you with­out any travel involved.

Spon­sors

Spon­sor­ship Opportunities

Want to announce or pro­mote your ser­vice or prod­uct at the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit? Max­i­mize your mar­ket­ing and busi­ness devel­op­ment reach & make a big splash in front of our pres­ti­gious audi­ence! Only two Spon­sor­ship spots are still avail­able and going fast! Click here for infor­ma­tion about the var­i­ous ways to get involved.

Sum­mit Partners

Remem­ber…

Learn More and Reg­is­ter Today HERE

We are hon­ored to announce the fol­low­ing Spon­sors and Part­ners of the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (March 30th — April 1st, 2011). And we are look­ing for more, so please con­tact us if inter­ested! Read the rest of this entry »

Quick note: I will be speak­ing at the UCLA Tech­nol­ogy & Aging Con­fer­ence on Fri­day, Octo­ber 29th, in Los Ange­les. Please drop me a line or intro­duce your­self if you are plan­ning to attend.

The Sched­ule fea­tures many good ses­sions, includ­ing one on Brain Fitness:

• Descrip­tion: Grow­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence sug­gests that such strate­gies as phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise can improve brain health and cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. This ses­sion will review the lat­est research sup­port­ing brain fit­ness meth­ods, high­light new cog­ni­tive train­ing devices, and dis­cuss the chal­lenge of deter­min­ing the effec­tive­ness of these technologies.
• Speak­ers: Bill Reich­man (Bay­crest), Steven Aldrich (Posit Sci­ence), Gary & Rita Con­si­dine (Garri Pro­duc­tions), Alvaro Fer­nan­dez of (SharpBrains).
• Mod­er­a­tor: Gary Small (UCLA Cen­ter on Aging).

To learn more and reg­is­ter: click Here.

Since 2006, as part of the research sup­port­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness and Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket reports, we have inter­viewed dozens of leading-edge sci­en­tists and experts. Below are some of our favorite quotes and inter­views — you can read the full inter­view notes by click­ing on the links:

Con­ver­sa­tions in 2010

“…putting good evi­dence to work in prac­tice requires more than pub­lish­ing good research. I’d say that sci­en­tific evi­dence is directly rel­e­vant to per­haps 15% of clin­i­cal deci­sions…we require tech­nolo­gies that trans­late emer­gent knowl­edge into prac­tice.” - Dr. John Docherty, Adjunct Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at Weill Med­ical Col­lege, and for­mer Branch Chief at NIMH. Full Inter­view Notes.

“We should be think­ing about the brain through its whole life­time…We need to break the silos, to aggre­gate knowl­edge, to help advance our knowl­edge of the brain 50 years in 5 years.” — Patrick Dono­hue, founder of the Sarah Jane Brain Project. Full Inter­view Notes.

Con­ver­sa­tions in 2009

	“My dream in all of this is to have stan­dard­ized and cred­i­ble tools to train the 5–6 main neu­rocog­ni­tive domains for cogni tive health and per­for­mance through life, cou­pled with the right assess­ments to iden­tify one’s indi­vid ual needs and mea sure progress” — Dr. Michael Merzenich, Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor at UCSF, and pio­neer in brain plas­tic­ity research. Full Inter­view Notes.
	“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.” — Dr. William E. Reich­man, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Bay­crest. Full Inter­view Notes.
	“Growth only really comes at the point of resis­tance, but that is the moment that we tend to stop. Because it hurts…pushing our lim­its is a mus­cle that can be cul­ti­vated like any other–incrementally” — Joshua Wait­zkin, chess cham­pion and author of The Art of Learn­ing. Full Inter­view Notes.
	“The cor­re­la­tion between iden­ti­cal twins reared apart gives an over­es­ti­mate of her­i­tabil­ity because the envi­ron­ments of iden tical twins reared apart are often highly sim­i­lar. But the main con­tra­dic­tion of her­i­tabil­ity esti­mates lies in the fact that adop­tion pro­duces a huge effect on IQ” –Dr. Richard Nis­bett, Pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan and author of Intel­li­gence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cul­tures Count. Full Inter­view Notes.

For more, please visit our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series.

Mar­ian Dia­mond, UC-Berkeley: “Peo­ple fre­quently do the same level of cross­word puz­zles to stim­u­late their brains year after year. They do not chal­lenge their brains with more dif­fi­cult lev­els of puz­zles. In our research, we showed that if we chal­lenged the rats to reach their food cups by hav­ing to climb over many obstruc­tions, their brains increased more than those of rats who could walk unhin­dered to their food cups. Chal­lenge increased brain size.”

Tom War­den, All­state: “… we see the oppor­tu­nity that cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­vides as just the next evo­lu­tion of things that we can advo­cate and get behind that ulti­mately make for a bet­ter dri­ving expe­ri­ence, a safer dri­ving expe­ri­ence for peo­ple. Not only for our insureds, but to help the roads be safer for everyone…what we did is to attempt to repli­cate the results that were observed in the lab­o­ra­tory envi­ron­ment where older dri­vers who have com­pleted a good amount of train­ing, 10 hours or more of train­ing, had shown that the risk of crash could be reduced by up to about 50%.”

David White­house, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions: “Man­aged care has not always been on the fore­front of inno­va­tion and it has been, for us, a chal­lenge and an excite­ment to think about how best to incor­po­rate the lat­est find­ings in neu­ro­science. If I was to give you the major areas that we think are impor­tant, one is the impor­tance of neu­ro­science capa­bilit­ties to improve triage, the sec­ond is the impor­tance that this has on increas­ing access to much bet­ter func­tional assess­ments and its rela­tion­ship to safety. The third is in the area of clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port and the fourth is in brain health. First and fore­most, why is it that in every other organ we have objec­tive data of the organ itself doing its work under var­i­ous loads to help us when we need to make deci­sions about its health and dis­ease state and how best to sup­port it and intervene.”

William Reich­man, Bay­crest: “…we must do for brain health in the 21st cen­tury what we largely accom­plished in car­dio­vas­cu­lar health in the past century…that includes an increased focus not only on ter­tiary pre­ven­tion, but on pri­mary and sec­ondary prevention…approximately a year and a half ago the Ontario gov­ern­ment made a deci­sion to invest $10 mil­lion in Canada’s first cen­tre for brain fit­ness to be housed at Bay­crest at the Rot­man Research Institute.…Here in Canada I think that we’ve been able to make a com­pelling case main­tain­ing good brain fit­ness needs to be a national pri­or­ity for this coun­try and we have been engaged in dis­cus­sions with the gov­ern­ment, both fed­er­ally and provin­cially, that brain health pro­grams really need to begin in childhood.”

P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke Uni­ver­sity: “… you don’t want to walk into a gro­cery store or into a gas sta­tion and see a brain game claim­ing that they’re a neu­ro­plas­tic­ity brain game or a bot­tle of water that’s claim­ing it’s a cog­ni­tive reserve enhancer because then I think you’re going to destroy the whole field key…So I think it’s essen­tial for acad­e­mia, for indus­try, for think tanks, for even the fed­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies such as per­haps Eng­land, US, Canada, to come together and form a set of guide­lines that can really guide the proper devel­op­ment of a lot of these prod­ucts and by prod­ucts I’m talk­ing about two types of prod­ucts. One is cog­ni­tive screen­ing instru­ments and the sec­ond is inter­ven­tion prod­ucts to either improve sort of nor­mal func­tion­ing or to increase resilience to stress or three, to pre­vent disease.”

(answer­ing to audi­ence ques­tion, “when do you believe that cog­ni­tive screen­ing may become a pretty rou­tine part of stan­dard med­ical care”) “I think it’s long overdue…the brain is the most impor­tant organ.”

—

In Jan­u­ary of 2010 Sharp­Brains pro­duced the inau­gural vir­tual, global Sharp­Brains Sum­mit on Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance (Jan­u­ary 18-20th, 2010). The Sum­mit fea­tured a dream team of over 40 speak­ers who are lead­ers in indus­try and research to dis­cuss emerg­ing research, tools and best prac­tices for cog­ni­tive health and per­for­mance, and gath­ered over 250 par­tic­i­pants in 16 countries.

Are you inter­ested in what over 40 lead­ing sci­en­tists, clin­i­cians, exec­u­tives and tech­nol­o­gists have to say about the lat­est Tech­nol­ogy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance? Want to hear how they responded to more than 200 audi­ence ques­tions? You can Learn more Here (full tran­scripts are now avail­able). Sharp­Brains read­ers can get a 15% dis­count Read the rest of this entry »