New study shows Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion improves brain func­tion­ing in ADHD stu­dents (press release):

- “Prior research shows ADHD chil­dren have slower brain devel­op­ment and a reduced abil­ity to cope with stress,” said Dr. Stixrud. “Vir­tu­ally every­one finds it dif­fi­cult to pay atten­tion, orga­nize them­selves and get things done when they’re under stress,” he explained. “Stress inter­feres with Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Michael Merzenich, Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor at UCSF, is a lead­ing pio­neer in brain plas­tic­ity research. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant. In 1996, he was the found­ing CEO of Sci­en­tific Learn­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (Nas­daq: SCIL), and in 2004 became co-founder and Chief Sci­en­tific Offi­cer of Posit Sci­ence. He was elected to the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences in 1999 and to the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine this year. He retired as Fran­cis A. Sooy Pro­fes­sor and Co-Director of the Keck Cen­ter for Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Fran­cisco in 2007. You may have learned about his work in one of PBS TV spe­cials, mul­ti­ple media appear­ances, or neuroplasticity-related books.

(Alvaro Fer­nan­dez) Dear Michael, thank you very much for agree­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the inau­gural Sharp­Brains Sum­mit in Jan­u­ary, and for your time today. In order to con­tex­tu­al­ize the Summit’s main themes, I would like to focus this inter­view on the likely big-picture impli­ca­tions dur­ing the next 5 years of your work and that of other neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research and indus­try pioneers.

Thank you for invit­ing me. I believe the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit will be very use­ful and stim­u­lat­ing, you are gath­er­ing an impres­sive group together. I am look­ing for­ward to January.

Neuroplasticity-based Tools: The New Health & Well­ness Frontier

There are many dif­fer­ent technology-free approaches to har­ness­ing –enabling, dri­ving– neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. What is the unique value that tech­nol­ogy brings to the cog­ni­tive health table?

It’s all about effi­ciency, scal­a­bil­ity, per­son­al­iza­tion, and assured effec­tive­ness. Tech­nol­ogy sup­ports the imple­men­ta­tion of near-optimally-efficient brain-training strate­gies. Through the Inter­net, it enables the low-cost dis­tri­b­u­tion of these new tools, any­where out in the world. Tech­nol­ogy also enables the per­son­al­iza­tion of brain health train­ing, by pro­vid­ing sim­ple ways to mea­sure and address indi­vid­ual needs in each person’s brain-health train­ing expe­ri­ence. It enables assess­ments of your abil­i­ties that can affirm that your own brain health issues have been effec­tively addressed.

Of course sub­stan­tial gains could also be achieved by orga­niz­ing your every­day activ­i­ties that grow your neu­ro­log­i­cal abil­i­ties and sus­tain your brain health. Still, if the ordi­nary cit­i­zen is to have any real chance of main­tain­ing their brain fit­ness, they’re going to have to spend con­sid­er­able time at the brain gym!

One espe­cially impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion of tech­nol­ogy is the scal­a­bil­ity that it pro­vides for deliv­er­ing brain fit­ness help out into the world. Think about how effi­cient the drug deliv­ery sys­tem is today. Doc­tors pre­scribe drugs, insur­ance cov­ers them, and there is a drug store in every neigh­bor­hood in almost every city in the world so that every patient has access to them. Once neuroplasticity-based tools and out­comes and stan­dard­ized, we can envi­sion a sim­i­lar sce­nario. And we don’t need all those drug stores, because we have the Internet!

Hav­ing said this, there are obvi­ous obsta­cles. One main one, in my mind, is the lack of under­stand­ing of what these new tools can do. Cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams, for exam­ple, seem counter-intuitive to con­sumers and many pro­fes­sion­als “ why would one try to improve speed-of-processing if all one cares about is œmem­ory? A sec­ond obvi­ous prob­lem is to get indi­vid­u­als to buy into the effort required to really change their brains for the bet­ter. That buy-in has been achieved for many indi­vid­u­als as it applies to their phys­i­cal health, but we haven’t got­ten that far yet in edu­cat­ing the aver­age older per­son that brain fit­ness train­ing is an equally effort­ful business!

Tools for Safer Dri­ving: Teens and Adults

Safe dri­ving seems to be one area where the ben­e­fits are more intu­itive, which may explain the sig­nif­i­cant traction.

Yes, we see great poten­tial and inter­est among insur­ers for improv­ing dri­ving safety, both for seniors and teens. Appro­pri­ate cog­ni­tive train­ing can lower at-fault acci­dent rates. You can mea­sure clear ben­e­fits in rel­a­tively short time frames, so it won’t take long for insur­ers to see an eco­nomic ratio­nale to not only offer pro­grams at low cost or for free but to incen­tivize dri­vers to com­plete them. All­state, AAA, State Farm and other insur­ers are begin­ning to real­ize this poten­tial. It is impor­tant to note that typ­i­cal acci­dents among teens and seniors are dif­fer­ent, so that train­ing method­olo­gies will need to be dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent high-risk populations.

Yet, most dri­ving safety ini­tia­tives today still focus on edu­cat­ing dri­vers, rather that train­ing them neu­ro­log­i­cally. We mea­sure vision, for exam­ple, but com­pletely ignore atten­tional con­trol abil­i­ties, or a driver’s use­ful field of view. I expect this to change sig­nif­i­cantly over the next few years.

Long-term care and health insur­ance com­pa­nies will ulti­mately see sim­i­lar ben­e­fits, and we believe that they will fol­low a sim­i­lar course of action to reduce gen­eral med­ical and neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease– (Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment and Alzheimer’s– and Parkinsons-) related costs. In fact, many senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties are among the pio­neers in this field.

Boomers & Beyond: Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Vitality

Main­stream media is cov­er­ing this emerg­ing cat­e­gory with thou­sands of sto­ries. But most cov­er­age seems still focused on does it work? more than “how do we define It”, what does work mean? or work for whom, and for what? Can you sum­ma­rize what recent research suggests?

We have seen clear pat­terns in the appli­ca­tion of our train­ing pro­grams, some pub­lished (like IMPACT), some unpub­lished, some with healthy adults, and some with peo­ple with mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment or early Alzheimers Dis­ease (AD). What we see in every case: Read the rest of this entry »

The July/ August 2009 issue of The Jour­nal on Active Aging includes my arti­cle Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It“

An excerpt:

“By now you have prob­a­bly heard about brain plas­tic­ity, the life­long capac­ity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stim­u­la­tion of learn­ing and expe­ri­ence. The lat­est sci­en­tific research shows that spe­cific lifestyles and actions can improve the health and level of func­tion­ing of our brains, no mat­ter our age.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to main­tain­ing cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing through life are the hip­pocam­pus (deep inside the brain, part of what is called the lim­bic sys­tem), which plays a role in learn­ing and mem­ory; and the frontal lobes (behind your fore­head), which are key to main­tain­ing decision-making and auton­omy. Is there a way to phys­i­cally pro­tect these parts of the aging brain? Yes. But the right answer is far from “do one more cross­word puz­zle” or “do more X” (what­ever X is). The key is to add sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties to ensure a flow of nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge, com­bin­ing phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise while not ignor­ing fac­tors such as stress man­age­ment and bal­anced nutrition.

We need, in other words, to retool our under­stand­ing and prac­tice of “Use it or lose it.” We must focus on the impor­tance of get­ting out of our phys­i­cal and men­tal rou­tines and activ­i­ties to get the ben­e­fits of real exercise—physical and mental.”

Con­tinue read­ing Why We Need to Retool “Use It Or Lose It”

If you sub­scribe to our monthly newslet­ter, you may remem­ber we ran a sur­vey in Jan­u­ary. Well, the response rate and the qual­ity of the responses were noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar, in many dimen­sions. The responses from over 2,000 par­tic­i­pants (out of 21,000 sub­scribers) rein­force the need for pub­lic aware­ness ini­tia­tives and qual­ity infor­ma­tion to help eval­u­ate and nav­i­gate prod­uct claims.

I have been pre­sent­ing the results from one of the ques­tions (see below), yes­ter­day at the ASA/ NCOA (Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging) event, today at IHRSA (Inter­na­tional Health, Rac­quet and Sports­club Asso­ci­a­tion), as part of more com­pre­hen­sive pre­sen­ta­tions of what is going on in the brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive health field.

An obvi­ous impli­ca­tion for the sur­vey result rein­forces the need for brain-related pub­lic aware­ness cam­paigns such as the ongo­ing Brain Aware­ness Week. Every year, land­mark research find­ings open new oppor­tu­ni­ties to help main­tain life­long cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness. The oppor­tu­nity is immense — but we will need to ensure the mar­ket­place matures in a ratio­nal and sus­tain­able man­ner, help­ing con­sumers and pro­fes­sion­als sep­a­rate hope from hype and make informed decisions.

Robin Klaus, Chair­man of Club One Fit­ness Cen­ters (the com­pany is a client, he is an advi­sor), just gave us a nice quote say­ing that “as our pop­u­la­tion ages the fields of phys­i­cal fit­ness and brain fit­ness will nat­u­rally merge and, as this hap­pens, a whole new field of val­ued added ser­vices will emerge for our mem­bers. High qual­ity infor­ma­tional resources such as Sharp­Brains’ are cru­cial to the suc­cess of this merger.”

The Sur­vey: Results to Key Question

Asked, “What is the most impor­tant prob­lem you see in the brain fit­ness field and how do you think it can be solved?” respon­dents iden­ti­fied the fol­low­ing six prob­lems in rank order:

#1: Pub­lic Aware­ness (39%)
– “Get­ting peo­ple to under­stand that hered­ity alone does not decide brain func­tion­ing.“
– “An expec­tant pub­lic will first want to believe that a “mir­a­cle” drug is to be soon avail­able (to pre­vent Alzheimer’s Disease).”

#2: Nav­i­gat­ing Claims (21%)
- “How to sep­a­rate mar­ket­ing hype from stuff that really works?“
– “The lack of stan­dards and clear def­i­n­i­tions is very con­fus­ing, and makes a lot of peo­ple sceptical.”

#3: Research (15%)
– “Deter­min­ing what activ­i­ties are most ben­e­fi­cial to Read the rest of this entry »

We have talked about the value of med­i­ta­tion before (see Mind­ful­ness and Med­i­ta­tion in Schools), as a form of well-directed men­tal exer­cise than can help train atten­tion and emo­tional self-regulation.  Which other stud­ies have shown how it strength­ens spe­cific parts of the brain, mainly in the frontal lobe.

Dr. Rabiner shares with us, below, an excel­lent review of a new study that ana­lyzes the ben­e­fits of mind­ful­ness for ado­les­cents and adults with atten­tion deficits. He writes that “although this is clearly a pre­lim­i­nary study, the results are both inter­est­ing and encouraging.”

- Alvaro

Does Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion Help Adults & Teens with ADHD

– By Dr. David Rabiner

Although med­ica­tion treat­ment is effec­tive for many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, includ­ing ado­les­cents adults, there remains an under­stand­able need to explore and develop inter­ven­tions that can com­ple­ment or even sub­sti­tute for med­ica­tion. This is true for a vari­ety of rea­sons includ­ing:
1) Not all adults with ADHD ben­e­fit from med­ica­tion.
2) Among those who ben­e­fit, many have resid­ual dif­fi­cul­ties that need to be addressed via other means.
3) Some adults with ADHD expe­ri­ence adverse effects that pre­vent them from remain­ing on medication.

Read the rest of this entry »

We human beings are social ani­mals. It seems intu­itive (even for intro­verts!) that social con­tact has ben­e­fits. Obvi­ously we need other peo­ple to ful­fill basic needs such mak­ing sure that our genes out­live. Maybe less obvi­ously we seem to need other peo­ple to main­tain ade­quate lev­els of men­tal well being and motivation.

Even less obvi­ously, social con­tact may help us improve our brain functions…

Men­tal fit­ness seems to depend on a large part on being con­nected with other peo­ple. For instance peo­ple with low social sup­port seem to be more prone to men­tal ill­ness (McGuire & Raleigh, 1986). In 2007, Glad­stone and col­leagues stud­ied 218 patients with major depres­sion and found out that low social sup­port, espe­cially com­ing from the fam­ily, was asso­ci­ated with chronic depression.

Merely imag­in­ing lone­li­ness can neg­a­tively affect our behavior…

Read the rest of this entry »

A CDC report esti­mated that, in 2003, 4.4 mil­lion youth ages 4–17 lived with diag­nosed ADHD, and 2.5 mil­lion of them were receiv­ing med­ica­tion treat­ment. Now, which is the core deficit under­ly­ing ADHD-so that treat­ments really address it? and how are ADHD and brain devel­op­ment related? Keep reading…

ADHD & the Nature of Self-Control — Revis­it­ing Barkley’s The­ory of ADHD

— By David Rabiner, Ph.D

As implied in the title of his book, ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control, Dr. Barkley argues that the fun­da­men­tal deficit in indi­vid­u­als with ADHD is one of self-control, and that prob­lems with atten­tion are a sec­ondary char­ac­ter­is­tic of the disorder.

Dr. Barkley empha­sizes that dur­ing the course of devel­op­ment, con­trol over a child’s behav­ior grad­u­ally shifts from exter­nal sources to being increas­ingly gov­erned by inter­nal rules and stan­dards. Con­trol­ling one’s behav­ior by inter­nal rules and stan­dards is what is meant by the term “self-control”.

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 »

(Editor’s Note: Neu­ro­feed­back is one of the tech­nolo­gies that peo­ple often ask us about.  It is a promis­ing inter­ven­tion in a vari­ety of areas, and has got sig­nif­i­cant trac­tion in help­ing kids with ADD/ ADHD. Now, given the sig­nif­i­cant cost it poses for par­ents, we need to ask the ques­tion: “How Strong is the Research Sup­port for Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment of Chil­dren with ADHD”? We are hon­ored to present the thoughts of Duke University’s Dr. David Rabiner, a lead­ing author­ity on the field, on that impor­tant issue. As a bonus, you will enjoy his detailed descrip­tion and sug­ges­tions of how to design a high-quality sci­en­tific study.)

(Update as of March 2009: Dr. David Rabiner has writ­ten an update to the arti­cle below based on a newer study. You can read it click­ing on link: New Study Sup­ports Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment for ADHD)
————————————–

How Strong is the Research Sup­port for Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment of Chil­dren with ADHD?

Nei­ther of the two promi­nent approaches to treat­ing ADHD — med­ica­tion treat­ment and behav­ior ther­apy — are expected to effect long term changes in the child. Med­ica­tion treat­ment induces short-term changes in brain activ­ity that is asso­ci­ated with a reduc­tion in symp­toms for many indi­vid­u­als. Behav­ior ther­apy attempts to cre­ate a set of envi­ron­men­tal con­tin­gen­cies that pro­mote desired behav­ior in the child, but which is unlikely to endure when those con­tin­gen­cies are removed.

In recent years, researchers have begun devot­ing greater atten­tion to the pos­si­bil­ity that chil­dren — and adults — may be pro­vided with par­tic­u­lar kinds of expe­ri­ences that may induce alter­ations in brain func­tion­ing that are asso­ci­ated with more endur­ing changes, i.e., they do not dis­si­pate as soon as treat­ment ends.

Neu­ro­feed­back — also known as EEG Biofeed­back — is reflec­tive of this approach and has a his­tory that goes back Read the rest of this entry »

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 is 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 Read the rest of this entry »