Brain Study Points to Poten­tial Treat­ments for Math Anx­i­ety (Edu­ca­tion Week):

• “The study, pub­lished this morn­ing in the jour­nal Cere­bral Cor­tex, is a con­tin­u­a­tion of work on highly math-anxious peo­ple being con­ducted by Sian L. Beilock, asso­ciate psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, and doc­toral can­di­date Ian M. Lyons. In prior research, Beilock has found that just the thought of doing math prob­lems can trig­ger stress responses in peo­ple with math anx­i­ety, and adult teach­ers can pass their trep­i­da­tion about math on to their stu­dents.” 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 »

Time for the Sep­tem­ber edi­tion of the monthly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, start­ing with a good brief New Sci­en­tist arti­cle, Maker of cog­ni­tive train­ing game seeks FDA approval: Imag­ine walk­ing away from a doctor’s office with a pre­scrip­tion to play a video game. Brain Plas­tic­ity, the devel­oper of a cog­ni­tive train­ing game, has begun talks with the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) to mar­ket the game as a ther­a­peu­tic drug.

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy: A Review of Mar­tin Seligman’s Lat­est Book: As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it.

Study: Cog­ni­tive Mark­ers or Bio­mark­ers to man­age Cog­ni­tive Health across the Lifes­pan? Mea­sur­ing people’s changes in cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties is a bet­ter pre­dic­tor of Alzheimer’s dis­ease than changes in bio­mark­ers, researchers from the Ben­ito Menni Com­plex Assis­ten­cial en Salut Men­tal, Barcelona, Spain, reported in Archives of Gen­eral Psy­chi­a­try, a JAMA journal.

Brain Train­ing for Babies: Hope, Hype, Both? We should expect that the brain of a baby could be eas­ily trained. This is what Wass and his col­leagues recently demon­strated in a new study with 11-month-old babies.

Brain Devel­op­ment Through Bilin­gual Edu­ca­tion and Activ­i­ties Requir­ing Self-Control: Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned.

Who Says This is The Class­room of the Future? What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­ogy in lit­er­ally mind­less ways?

AARP’s Best Brain Fit­ness Books: We are hon­ored to announce that AARP has included our very own book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (182 pages; $14.95) in its new List of Best Books on Brain Fitness.

Inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D: Here’s a cool inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D you can play with.

Have a great month of Octo­ber and, as always, feel free to share this enewslet­ter with friends and colleagues.

PS: Did you miss the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (Mar 30 — Apr 1, 2011)? Here you can learn more about how to access the recordings.

Good brief arti­cle at New Sci­en­tist, Maker of cog­ni­tive train­ing game seeks FDA approval:

- “Imag­ine walk­ing away from a doctor’s office with a pre­scrip­tion to play a video game. Brain Plas­tic­ity, the devel­oper of a cog­ni­tive train­ing game, has begun talks with the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) to mar­ket the game as a ther­a­peu­tic drug.”

- “Brain Plas­tic­ity has been fine-tuning a game to help peo­ple with schiz­o­phre­nia improve the deficits in atten­tion and mem­ory that are often asso­ci­ated with the disorder.”

(Editor’s note: Path­ways respon­si­ble for higher-order think­ing in the pre­frontal cor­tex (PFC), or exec­u­tive cen­ter of the brain, remain vul­ner­a­ble through­out life—during crit­i­cal early-life devel­op­men­tal win­dows, when the PFC fully matures in the early 20s, and finally from declines asso­ci­ated with old age. At all ages, phys­i­cal activ­ity and PFC-navigated social con­nec­tions are essen­tial com­po­nents to main­tain­ing brain health. The Expe­ri­ence Corps, a community-based social-engagement pro­gram, part­ners seniors with local schools to pro­mote purpose-driven involve­ment. Par­tic­i­pat­ing seniors have exhib­ited imme­di­ate short-term gains in brain regions vul­ner­a­ble to aging, such as the PFC, indi­cat­ing that peo­ple with the most to lose have the most to gain from envi­ron­men­tal enrichment.)

Over the last decade, sci­en­tists made two key dis­cov­er­ies that reframed our under­stand­ing of the adult brain’s poten­tial to ben­e­fit from life­long envi­ron­men­tal enrich­ment. First, they learned that the adult brain remains plas­tic; it can gen­er­ate new neu­rons in response to phys­i­cal activ­ity and new expe­ri­ences. Sec­ond, they con­firmed the impor­tance of social con­nect­ed­ness to late-life cog­ni­tive, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and phys­i­cal health. The inte­gra­tion of these find­ings with our under­stand­ing of indi­vid­u­als’ devel­op­men­tal needs through­out life under­scores the impor­tance of the “social brain.” The pre­frontal cor­tex (PFC) is par­tic­u­larly inte­gral to nav­i­gat­ing com­plex social behav­iors and hier­ar­chies over the life course. Read the rest of this entry »

A cou­ple of very inter­est­ing recent announce­ments show (in a mil­i­tary con­text) how well-targeted brain train­ing can com­ple­ment and aug­ment exist­ing approaches, both to help “nor­mal” and “clin­i­cal” pop­u­la­tions, in ways that silo-based, rear-mirror think­ing often misses: Read the rest of this entry »

Every Mon­day dur­ing the next 10 weeks we’ll dis­cuss here what lead­ing indus­try, sci­ence and pol­icy experts –all of whom will speak at the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (March 30th — April 1st, 2011)– have to say about emerg­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges to address, over the next 10 years, the grow­ing brain-related soci­etal demands.

With­out fur­ther ado, here you have what four Sum­mit Speak­ers say…

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Alvaro Pascual-Leone is the Direc­tor of the Berenson-Allen Cen­ter for Non-Invasive Brain Stim­u­la­tion at Har­vard Med­ical School.

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

Phys­i­cal fit­ness can refer to an over­all or gen­eral state of health and well-being. How­ever, it is also often used more specif­i­cally to refer to the abil­ity to per­form a given activ­ity, occu­pa­tion, or sport.

Sim­i­larly brain fit­ness might be used to refer to a gen­eral state of healthy, opti­mized brain func­tion, or a more spe­cific brain-based abil­ity to process cer­tain, spe­cific infor­ma­tion, enable cer­tain motor actions, or sup­port cer­tain cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. Impor­tantly though, I would argue Read the rest of this entry »

Yes­ter­day I had the chance to chat with Yaakov Stern, lead­ing Cog­ni­tive Reserve researcher at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, and then with a group of 25 life­long learn­ers in Ari­zona who attended a brain fit­ness class (hello, Robert and friends!) based on our con­sumer guide The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness. On reflec­tion, I found both con­ver­sa­tions to be very stim­u­lat­ing for the same rea­son: they were forward-looking, focused not so much on sta­tus quo but on how emerg­ing research, tech­nol­ogy and trends may impact our soci­ety and lives in years to come. Let’s con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion. Let me share the 10 main trends that we analyzed/ fore­casted in our book, and then ask you, sharp read­ers, to add your own 2 cents to the dis­cus­sion. Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have the March edi­tion of our monthly eNewslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this free Brain Fit­ness eNewslet­ter by email, using the box in the right column.

Designed to fos­ter inno­va­tion and best prac­tice shar­ing by cel­e­brat­ing out­stand­ing pio­neers who apply neuroplasticity-based research and tools in the “real world”, the new Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion Awards are accept­ing entries until April 15th. You can sub­mit an entry, and learn about the Judges, Prizes and Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions, by click­ing on 2010 Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion Awards. Win­ners will be announced on May 24th dur­ing the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit on the State of The Brain Fit­ness Market.

The Big Picture

A Decade After the Decade of the Brain:  “Dur­ing the past two decades, neu­ro­sci­en­tists have steadily built the case that the human brain, even when fully mature, is far more plastic—changing and malleable—than we orig­i­nally thought. It turns out that the brain (at all ages) is highly respon­sive to envi­ron­men­tal stim­uli and that con­nec­tions between neu­rons are dynamic and can rapidly change within min­utes of stim­u­la­tion”, says Dr. Nora Volkow, Direc­tor of one of the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH), while dis­cussing the med­ical and edu­ca­tional impli­ca­tions of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity in this arti­cle pre­pared for Dana Foundation’s Cere­brum.

Improv­ing Care through Pol­icy, Stan­dards, and Tech­nol­ogy: Patrick Dono­hue, founder of the Sarah Jane Brain Project, granted Sharp­Brains an extended inter­view to dis­cuss the PABI Plan in front of Con­gress, which may pass soon and help develop a model sys­tem for Pedi­atric Acquired Brain Injuries (PABI) which is the lead­ing cause of death and dis­abil­ity for chil­dren and young adults from birth through 25 years of age in the United States. This plan has the poten­tial to fun­da­men­tally trans­form brain care through the use of neu­roin­for­mat­ics and stan­darized sys­tems of care. As Patrick points out, “tech­nol­ogy is a very strong com­po­nent to ensure scal­a­bil­ity and fos­ter inno­va­tion. Our expec­ta­tion is that some genius stu­dent at MIT will find a way to ana­lyze all the med­ical records, find pat­terns and pre­dict poten­tial solu­tions that can help spe­cific patients.”

News

Cog­ni­tive therapy’s grow­ing adop­tion in the UK: Since the UK’s National Insti­tute for Health and Clin­i­cal Excel­lence (NICE) said that cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy (CBT) should be the first-line treat­ment for mild to mod­er­ate depres­sion –fol­lowed by drugs only if it proves unsuc­cess­ful– this type of men­tal train­ing is gain­ing wider pro­mo­tion by the National Health Ser­vice. We see US-based insur­ance com­pa­nies tak­ing good note.

Research Part­ner­ship on Cog­ni­tive Aging: The National Insti­tute on Aging and McK­night Foun­da­tion part­ner to invest $28m in research given that “emerg­ing evi­dence sug­gests that cer­tain inter­ven­tions — such as exer­cise, envi­ron­men­tal enrich­ment, diet, social engage­ment, cog­ni­tive train­ing and stress reduc­tion — should be stud­ied more inten­sively to deter­mine if they might pre­vent or reduce declines in cog­ni­tive health”. We laud the ini­tia­tive, and fur­ther ask: Why $28 mil­lion and not, say, $300m (one dol­lar per liv­ing Amer­i­can who tomor­row will be one day older than he or she is today)?, Why the empha­sis on “pre­vent, reduce or reverse decline” and not on “develop, improve, main­tain brain func­tion­al­ity for qual­ity of life and productivity”?

Mind Stretch­ing

10 Mitos sobre el Cere­bro y el Entre­namiento Men­tal: By pop­u­lar demand, we trans­lated the arti­cle Debunk­ing 10 Brain and Brain Fit­ness Myths to Span­ish. Can you give it a try in Span­ish first and see how it goes? If you are look­ing for added men­tal exer­cise and want to help us trans­late it to other lan­guages, please let us know!

Brain Fit­ness Sur­vey: please spare 5–10 min­utes with us, answer­ing a few stim­u­lat­ing ques­tions such as “How impor­tant do you believe are the fol­low­ing brain func­tions to thrive per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally in the XXI century”?

Finally, a quick note. I am going to travel exten­sively in Europe between June and Novem­ber 2010. If you want to pro­pose speak­ing or con­sult­ing engage­ments there, please Con­tact Us.

Have a stim­u­lat­ing Spring!

Nice week­end read­ing mate­r­ial — recent news reiforc­ing emerg­ing trends on phys­i­cal, cog­ni­tive and emo­tional fit­ness, but with new twists.

Fit teens could be smarter teens

“Researchers from Swe­den and USC exam­ined data on 1.2 mil­lion Swedish men born between 1950 and 1976 who also enlisted for the country’s manda­tory mil­i­tary ser­vice. They looked at the par­tic­i­pants’ global intel­li­gence scores as well as log­i­cal, visu­ospa­tial, ver­bal and tech­ni­cal scores. The greater the car­dio­vas­cu­lar fit­ness, the higher the cog­ni­tive scores at age 18. The asso­ci­a­tion between mus­cle strength and global intel­li­gence, in con­trast, was weak.”

UPMC Health Plan Offers Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware to Improve Health

“UPMC Health Plan announced today that it has signed an agree­ment to offer award-winning brain fit­ness soft­ware from Posit Sci­ence®, at no cost, to all UPMC for Life Medicare Advan­tage mem­bers. This brain train­ing pro­gram is a new part of the UPMC Health Plan well­ness ser­vices, which focus on both mind and body fitness.

The brain fit­ness soft­ware, known as the Insight™ Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, is a suite of five game-like com­puter exer­cises that make brain train­ing chal­leng­ing and effec­tive. The pro­gram engages the brain’s nat­ural plas­tic­ity (the brain’s abil­ity to rewire itself) to improve basic brain function.”

Brain-fitness indus­try grows as baby-boomers work to stay sharp.

“When we’re younger we’re learn­ing quite inten­sively,” she said. “By mid­dle age, we’re not learn­ing inten­sively any­more and just using skills we’ve already mas­tered. That’s why it’s impor­tant to stretch your brain.”

Brain fit­ness games also have the poten­tial to improve one’s emo­tional health, said Mark Bald­win, a psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at McGill Uni­ver­sity in Montreal.

Bald­win has devel­oped a num­ber of com­puter games based on keep­ing a brain active phys­i­o­log­i­cally, to improve it psychologically.

“It’s about prac­tis­ing or using games to train ben­e­fi­cial habits of thought, ” he said.