Round-up of recent news on cog­ni­tive health and brain fitness:

1) Impres­sive coup by Posit Sci­ence: Wal­ter Moss­berg reviews DriveSharp:

A Review of Dri­ve­Sharp (Wall Street Journal)

- “My ver­dict is that it was easy to use, and it did indeed work on my abil­ity to rapidly recall the color and posi­tion of mul­ti­ple mov­ing objects and of objects on the periph­ery of my vision. It intel­li­gently adjusted to my per­for­mance, and grad­u­ally pre­sented me with tougher tasks.”

- “How­ever, two major caveats are in order. First, I am nei­ther a sci­en­tist nor a doc­tor, so I can’t vouch for the company’s claims about DriveSharp’s ben­e­fits or even the under­ly­ing prob­lem it aims to alle­vi­ate. Sec­ondly, I wasn’t able to test Dri­ve­Sharp long enough to know if it actu­ally made me a bet­ter driver.”

2) Now, is the poten­tial lim­ited to older dri­vers? not really, as noted in this Seat­tle Times article:

Brain-fitness com­pa­nies apply­ing neu­ro­science to make safer dri­vers (Seat­tle Times)

- “Cog­niFit Pres­i­dent Shlomo Breznitz says pre­vi­ous ver­sions of this soft­ware have been in use by the largest dri­ving schools in the U.K. and Canada.”

- “The brains of new dri­vers have to acquire new skills that take time to develop,” he said. “Typ­i­cally, they take about two years of dri­ving, as wit­nessed by acci­dent records all over the world. By actively train­ing these skills the time needed for the brain to achieve the same level of exper­tise is short­ened. This short­ens the extremely high risk period of new drivers.”

3) Chal­lenge — do peo­ple under­stand what we are talk­ing about? not always, as reported in this great spe­cial issue of The Gerontologist:

GSA — Pop­u­la­tion Seg­ments Dif­fer on Per­cep­tions of Cog­ni­tive Health

- “All demo­graphic groups stud­ied believed that cog­ni­tive health is influ­enced by phys­i­cal, men­tal, and social activ­ity; how­ever, they dif­fered in opin­ions of the ben­e­fits of spe­cific activ­i­ties, nutri­tion, and genet­ics. The respon­dents also indi­cated that that media mes­sages about cog­ni­tive health are lim­ited and con­fus­ing. Fur­ther­more, many agreed that health mes­sages that incor­po­rate spe­cific com­mu­nity val­ues and are deliv­ered within pre-existing social groups by com­mu­nity lead­ers may be par­tic­u­larly effec­tive.“
– “Fund­ing for the spe­cial issue, titled “Pro­mot­ing Cog­ni­tive Health in Diverse Pop­u­la­tions of Older Adults: Atti­tudes, Per­cep­tions, Behav­iors, and their Impli­ca­tions for Community-Based Inter­ven­tions,” was pro­vided by the CDC’s Healthy Aging Program.”

All in all, very rel­e­vant data points that sug­gest the field is quickly approach­ing mainstream.

We recently pre­pared a Direc­tory of Web Sites as part of our Resources sec­tion. You will find some gems here, in a vari­ety of areas:

» The Dana Foun­da­tion offers sev­eral excel­lent online resources:

- Brainy Kids Online offers chil­dren, teens, par­ents and teach­ers links to games, labs, edu­ca­tion resources and les­son plans.

- Brain­Web: gen­eral infor­ma­tion about the brain and cur­rent brain research, as well as links to val­i­dated sites related to more than 25 brain disorders.

- Brain Resources for Seniors pro­vides older adults and their care­tak­ers with links to sites related to brain health, edu­ca­tion and gen­eral information.

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Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).

Hello, this is Andreas again, the MD/ PhD stu­dent in cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science and new sum­mer intern here.

Cognitive/ brain health is finally get­ting more atten­tion by Pub­lic offi­cials. On June 10th the National Pub­lic Health Road Map to Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Health was released by the CDC and the Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion. The authors pro­pose a set of 44 actions to reach a lofty goal: To main­tain or improve the cog­ni­tive per­for­mance of all adults. This is great tim­ing, given all the research and media atten­tion that this field is getting.

I want to share with you the 10 top actions pro­posed by this report:

1) To deter­mine how diverse audi­ences think about cog­ni­tive health and its asso­ci­a­tions with lifestyle fac­tors. This work has all-ready yielded in a phe­nom­e­nal report on Baby boomers’ cur­rent opin­ion of Brain Health and Fitness.

2) To dis­sem­i­nate the lat­est sci­ence to increase pub­lic under­stand­ing of cog­ni­tive health and to dis­pel com­mon mis­con­cep­tions. The dis­cov­ery of life­long neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis has given us a new pos­i­tive view
upon the human brain — This is still a con­cept not many know of. “Use it or lose it” and “Use It and Get More of It” needs to reach all peo­ple. See this good overview on the topic.

3) Help peo­ple under­stand the con­nec­tion between risk and pro­tec­tive fac­tors and cog­ni­tive health. Pro­tec­tive fac­tors are well sum­ma­rized in this blog post on the results from the Macarthur study of suc­cess­ful aging.

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I was sent these links to a free online cross­word puz­zle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excel­lent computer-based brain fit­ness pro­grams avail­able, puz­zles can still be good men­tal exer­cise … they are just not a com­plete work­out for your whole brain.

Word games like cross­word puz­zles and SCRABBLE® exer­cise your lex­i­cal recall (mem­ory for words that name things), atten­tion, mem­ory, and pat­tern recog­ni­tion. They can help main­tain your vocab­u­lary and avoid the frus­trat­ing tip-of-the-tongue phe­nom­e­non that all of us expe­ri­ence from time to time. Sudoko is not a math­e­mat­ics game in that you don’t actu­ally manip­u­late the num­bers as math­e­mat­i­cal enti­ties, but it is a pat­tern recog­ni­tion game using sym­bols (num­bers). A very legit­i­mate rea­son to play casual games is that they can be social and fun — which is good for reduc­ing stress.

The draw­backs to puz­zles and games is that they are hard to cal­i­brate to ensure increas­ing chal­lenge, and they gen­er­ally only exer­cise a lim­ited num­ber of brain functions.

So by all means, do puz­zles if you enjoy them! But be sure to push your­self to keep find­ing harder ones that fall just short of frus­trat­ing you. Also, just as you cross train your vol­un­tary mus­cles, be sure to cross train your men­tal mus­cles by bal­anc­ing your work­out with other types of men­tal work (motor coor­di­na­tion, audi­tory, work­ing mem­ory, plan­ning, etc.). The com­put­er­ized pro­grams make it eas­ier for you in the sense that they are indi­vid­u­ally cal­i­brated for you to employ nov­elty, vari­ety, chal­lenge, and prac­tice to exer­cise your brain more thor­oughly in each session.

Fur­ther read­ing on lan­guage pro­duc­tion, com­pre­hen­sion, and goofs:

• Lan­guage Pro­duc­tion and Perception
• Wernicke's Area: an area of the brain where the tem­po­ral and pari­etal lobes meet that is used in under­stand­ing and com­pre­hend­ing spo­ken language
• Broca’s Area: an area in the frontal lobe of the brain that is involved in lan­guage pro­cess­ing, speech pro­duc­tion and comprehension
• The Lan­guage Pro­duc­tion Group at the Max Planck Insti­tute for Psycholinguistics