A cou­ple weeks ago I attended the Enter­tain­ment Soft­ware and Cog­ni­tive Neu­rother­a­peu­tics Con­fer­ence, ESCoNS, at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia San Fran­cisco. The speak­ers’ talks were insight­ful, sur­pris­ing, and inspir­ing in many regards. The pur­pose of this meet­ing was to bring together great minds in a vari­ety of fields from neu­ro­science to game design and to come up with some ideas how to make game based cog­ni­tive train­ing a real­ity as an effec­tive ther­apy for many of today’s most chal­leng­ing dis­or­ders and deficits. Many of the sci­en­tists also thought that game based ther­a­pies for cog­ni­tive deficits could be used as enhance­ment tools for healthy indi­vid­u­als as well. Read the rest of this entry »

You can see speak­ers and agenda by click­ing on Sharp­Brains Sum­mit. Please reg­is­ter if you are inter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing: Jan­u­ary 18-20th 2010 (Pacific Time).

• Con­fer­ence: Jan­u­ary 18-19th. 9–10 pan­els to dis­cuss Mar­ket and Research Insights,  together with online discussions.
• Expo Day: Jan­u­ary 20th. Prod­uct demos by Sponsors.

Con­firmed speak­ers and themes:

Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 18th, 2010:

Cog­ni­tion and Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: The New Health­care Frontier

• Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, CEO, SharpBrains
• David White­house, Chief Med­ical Offi­cer, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solutions
• William Reich­man, Pres­i­dent, Baycrest
• P Murali Doraiswamy, Bio­log­i­cal Psy­chi­a­try Divi­sion Head, Duke University

Tools for Safer Dri­ving: Teenagers and Older Adults

• Steven Aldrich, CEO, Posit Science
• Peter Chris­tian­son, Pres­i­dent of Young Dri­vers of Canada
• Jerri Edwards, Assoc. Pro­fes­sor Uni­ver­sity of South Florida

Clin­i­cal Appli­ca­tions: Research­ing, Iden­ti­fy­ing, Treat­ing Cog­ni­tive Deficits

• Keith Wesnes, Prac­tice Leader, United BioSource Corporation
• Jonas Jendi, CEO, Cogmed
• Michel Noir, Pres­i­dent, Sci­en­tific Brain Training
• Elkhonon Gold­berg, Chief Sci­en­tific Advi­sor, SharpBrains

Read the rest of this entry »

The grow­ing field of cog­ni­tive train­ing (one of the tools for brain fit­ness) can appear very con­fus­ing as the media keeps report­ing con­tra­dic­tory claims. These claims are often based on press releases, with­out a deeper eval­u­a­tion of the sci­en­tific evidence.

Let’s take a cou­ple of recent exam­ples, in suc­ces­sive days:

“It doesn’t work!” type of head­line:
Reuters (Feb. 10, 2009)  For­mal brain exer­cise won’t help healthy seniors: research“
Healthy older peo­ple shouldn’t bother spend­ing money on com­puter games and web­sites promis­ing to ward off men­tal decline, the author of a review of sci­en­tific evi­dence for the ben­e­fits of these “brain exer­cise” pro­grams says.

It works! type of head­line:
Sci­enceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009)  “Com­puter Exer­cises Improve Mem­ory And Atten­tion, Study Sug­gests“
Accord­ing to the researchers, par­tic­i­pants who used the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram also scored as well as those ten years younger, on aver­age, on mem­ory and atten­tion tests for which they did not train.

So, does struc­tured brain exer­cise / cog­ni­tive train­ing work or not?

The prob­lem may in fact reside in ask­ing this very ques­tion in the first place, as Alvaro pointed out a while ago in his arti­cle Alzheimer’s Dis­ease: too seri­ous to play with head­lines.

We need a more nuanced set of questions.

Why? Because:
1. Cog­ni­tion is made of sev­eral dif­fer­ent abil­i­ties (work­ing mem­ory, atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tions such as decision-making, etc)
2. Avail­able train­ing pro­grams do not all train the same abil­i­ties
3. Users of train­ing pro­grams do not all have the same needs or goals
4. We need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between enhanc­ing cog­ni­tive func­tions and delay­ing the onset of cog­ni­tive deficits such as Alzheimer’s.

Let’s illus­trate these points, by Read the rest of this entry »

How do you know when some­thing is fast mov­ing towards a Glad­wellian tip­ping point? When health insur­ance com­pa­nies and pub­lic pol­icy mak­ers launch sig­nif­i­cant initiatives.

For exam­ple, the gov­ern­ment of Ontario recently announced a $10 mil­lion invest­ment with Bay­crest Research Cen­tre who will part­ner with MaRS Ven­ture Group to develop and com­mer­cialise brain fit­ness tech­nolo­gies. The invest­ment was matched by an addi­tional $10 mil­lion from pri­vate sources.

Another impor­tant devel­op­ment was the $18 mil­lion agree­ment between the Australian-based Brain Resource Com­pany (ASX:BRC) and OptumHealth in the US. This will allow for the pro­vi­sion of web-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments as part of a clinician’s deci­sion sup­port systems.

These are some ini­tia­tives cov­ered in a webi­nar Top Ten Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events of 2008 pre­sented in Decem­ber for Sharp­Brains’ clients. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez described the state of play and main dri­vers behind the growth of the bur­geon­ing brain fit­ness mar­ket — which I will try and sum­ma­rize here.

The key dri­vers seem to be Read the rest of this entry »

My apolo­gies for not hav­ing blogged in a few days. I landed back in San Fran­cisco today after speak­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in a very stim­u­lat­ing event put together by the Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity’s Adap­tive Neural Sys­tems Cen­ter with fund­ing from the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion.

The 2-day sym­po­sium was titled Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging (link opens a PDF with the agenda), fea­tured impres­sive speak­ers and a highly qual­i­fied audi­ence, and cov­ered a wide array of cur­rent and future health­care and aging appli­ca­tions of neu­ro­science. The one aspect that was very mean­ing­ful for me to observe how often we dis­cussed cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, cog­ni­tive deficits, cog­ni­tive assess­ments, cog­ni­tive enhance­ment tools (both inva­sive and non-invasive) in a vari­ety of healthy aging and clin­i­cal contexts.

I will share more about the event in the next few days, includ­ing links to the fas­ci­nat­ing work pre­sented by speak­ers, but let me know sim­ply thank the two gra­cious orga­niz­ers and hosts of the event by quot­ing the goal of their cen­ter and work:

- Jimmy Abbas, PhD: “One of the hall­marks of bio­log­i­cal sys­tems is the abil­ity to adapt. In our work, we mimic neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems in order to endow tech­nol­ogy with the abil­ity to adapt, and we use tech­nol­ogy to max­i­mize adap­ta­tions in neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. With these approaches, we aim to pro­mote func­tional adap­ta­tion after disability.”

- Ranu Jung, PhD: “Our goal is to improve the qual­ity of life of indi­vid­u­als with dis­abil­i­ties by design­ing tech­niques to inves­ti­gate, replace and repair dam­aged neural sys­tems to enhance mobil­ity and func­tion­al­ity. Whether a per­son has spinal cord injury, limb loss or Parkinson’s dis­ease, mobil­ity and func­tion­al­ity mean independence.”

Links:

Cen­ter: Adap­tive Neural Sys­tems Center.

Agenda (PDF): Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging

Round-up of inter­est­ing recent news on cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness: the field is in motion.

1) Bay­crest cre­ates Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness with $10-million Invest­ment from Ontario Gov­ern­ment (Canada NewsWire)

2) Cog­ni­tive tests are the best way to select med­ical stu­dents (EurekAlert)

3) High blood pres­sure hard on the aging brain (Reuters)

4) Alzheimer’s tests ben­e­fi­cial for seniors (Atlanta-Journal Constitutional)

5) Dementia-Dreading Baby Boomers Spur Race to Invent Brain Games (Bloomberg)

6) Viv­ity Labs launches Fit Brains brain-training game site (VentureBeat) 

7) Depres­sion and Alzheimer’s (NHS Choices)

For selected quotes and com­ments, Read the rest of this entry »

I find via Mind­Hacks that NYT Mag­a­zine has pub­lished a great arti­cle titled The Gre­gar­i­ous Brain, sub­ti­tled “Williams syn­drome — a genetic acci­dent that causes cog­ni­tive deficits-”. The writer, David Dobbs, does an spec­tac­u­lar job at explain­ing that syn­drome in the con­text of what cog­ni­tive skills are and how they evolved. Some sam­ple quotes:

• “In the view of two of Bellugi’s fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tors, Albert Gal­aburda, a Har­vard Med­ical School pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy and neu­ro­science, and Allan Reiss, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine, Nicki’s learned facil­ity at sports talk illus­trates a cen­tral les­son of Williams and, for that mat­ter, mod­ern genet­ics: genes (or their absence) do not hard-wire peo­ple for cer­tain behav­iors. There is no gene for under­stand­ing cal­cu­lus. But genes do shape behav­ior and per­son­al­ity, and they do so by cre­at­ing brain struc­tures and func­tions that favor cer­tain abil­i­ties and appetites more than others.”
• “…This doesn’t mean that spe­cific behav­iors are hard-wired. M.I.T. math majors aren’t born doing cal­cu­lus, and peo­ple with Williams don’t enter life telling sto­ries. As Allan Reiss put it: “It’s not just ‘genes make brain make behav­ior.’ You have envi­ron­ment and expe­ri­ence too. By envi­ron­ment, Reiss means less the atmos­phere of a home or a school than the end­less string of chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties that life presents any per­son start­ing at birth.”
• (Talk­ing about when our ances­tors started to live in larger groups) “But the big­ger groups imposed a new brain load: the mem­bers had to be smart enough to bal­ance their indi­vid­ual needs with those of the pack. This meant coop­er­at­ing and exer­cis­ing some indi­vid­ual restraint. It also required Read the rest of this entry »