Time for Sharp­Brains’ Jan­u­ary 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing in this occa­sion mul­ti­ple thought-provoking per­spec­tives on how emerg­ing neu­ro­science can and should make us rethink pre­vail­ing prac­tices in edu­ca­tion, healthy aging and pre­ven­tive medicine.

Fea­tured Perspectives:

• The Future of Pre­ven­tive Brain Med­i­cine: Break­ing Down the Cog­ni­tion & Alzheimer’s Dis­ease Alpha­bet Soup, by Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa
• When 1 + 1 = 5: Dyscal­cu­lia and Work­ing Mem­ory, by Dr. Tracy Alloway
• New Review of Neu­ro­feed­back Treat­ment for ADHD — Cur­rent State of the Sci­ence, by Dr. David Rabiner
• The Busi­ness and Ethics of the Brain Fit­ness Boom, by Alvaro Fernandez
• (How to con­tribute arti­cles like these to SharpBrains.com)

New Research: 

• Brain func­tion can start declin­ing as early as age 45
• Edu­ca­tion for Men­tal Fit­ness: “A Sharper Mind, Mid­dle Age and Beyond”
• Life­long cog­ni­tive exer­cise may ward off Alzheimer’s pro­tein beta amyloid
• Cog­ni­tive Train­ing & Brain Teasers Can Increase Open­ness Among Older Adults
• Cog­ni­tive Train­ing in Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment (MCI)
• Does Nin­tendo Brain Age work as a brain train­ing game?
• Brain Injury Care: Treat­ment and Reim­burse­ment Challenges

Resources:

• The Ten Habits of a Sharp Brain
• Brain Teasers and Games, for Kids and Adults
• Upcom­ing Talk & Book Sign­ing in Wash­ing­ton, DC

Have a great month of February.

Issues with aging can be costly for retirees’ money (Asso­ci­ated Press).

Quotes:
– “With age comes wis­dom about money — up to a point.”

- “Years of han­dling your own finances and invest­ments sharpen the abil­ity to make sound deci­sions. But fail­ing to pre­pare for the day when 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 »

Excel­lent arti­cle about an emerg­ing “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care:

Mari­entina Got­sis, media lab man­ager at USC, started think­ing about design­ing apps with ther­a­peu­tic poten­tial when she real­ized that her phone had joined her wal­let and keys on the small list of things she never left home with­out. “It’s what keeps peo­ple con­nected, func­tional, feel­ing safe and enter­tained. So why not use what peo­ple hold on to close to deliver behav­ioral interventions?”

It’s the kind of inno­va­tion that Kath­leen Car­roll, a psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at Yale, says may be a “small rev­o­lu­tion” in men­tal health care. These apps are part of the “brain fit­ness” indus­try, a cat­e­gory that includes com­put­er­ized mem­ory exer­cises and cognitive-impairment assess­ment pro­grams, and that Sharp­Brains, a com­pany that ana­lyzes the indus­try, esti­mates to have grown 35 per­cent in 2009, to $295 million.

The idea of get­ting coun­sel­ing from a com­puter or smart­phone may seem strange, but it’s been in the works for years. In 2006, the British National Insti­tute for Health and Clin­i­cal Excel­lence rec­om­mended two pro­grams, Fear Fighter and Beat­ing the Blues, as first-line treat­ments for mild-to-moderate anx­i­ety and depression.

Full arti­cle deserves read­ing: Get Ther­apy through your iPhone (The Daily Beast)

(Editor’s Note: given the grow­ing media atten­tion to three appar­ently sep­a­rate worlds –cog­ni­tive enhance­ment via drugs, brain fit­ness train­ing soft­ware, com­put­er­ized neu­rocog­ni­tive assessments-, I found it refresh­ing to see our co-founder Elkhonon Gold­berg intro­duce the topic of cog­notropic drugs with an inte­gra­tive per­spec­tive in the much updated new edi­tion of his clas­sic book, now titled The New Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes In A Com­plex World. Below goes an excerpt).

For many neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists, like myself, sci­ence is a labor of love, but see­ing patients is bread and but­ter. Tra­di­tion­ally, the clin­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion of neu­ropsy­chol­ogy has been mostly diag­nos­tic, with pre­cious lit­tle to offer patients by way of treat­ment. Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy is not the only clin­i­cal dis­ci­pline for years con­signed to help­less voyeurism. Every dis­ci­pline con­cerned with cog­ni­tion shares this hum­bling predica­ment. A psy­chi­a­trist treat­ing a schiz­o­phrenic patient or a depressed patient finds him– or her­self in a sim­i­lar posi­tion. There are ample phar­ma­co­log­i­cal tools to treat the patient’s psy­chosis or mood, but very few to treat the patient’s cog­ni­tion. Even though psy­chi­a­trists increas­ingly rec­og­nize that cog­ni­tive impair­ment is often more debil­i­tat­ing in their patients than psy­chosis or mood dis­or­der, tra­di­tion­ally, very lit­tle direct effort has been aimed at improv­ing cognition.

A neu­rol­o­gist treat­ing a patient recov­er­ing from the effects of head injury does not fare much bet­ter. There are ade­quate means to con­trol the patient’s seizures but not his or her cog­ni­tive changes, despite the fact that cog­ni­tive impair­ment is usu­ally far more debil­i­tat­ing than an occa­sional seizure. Soci­ety has been so pre­oc­cu­pied with sav­ing lives, treat­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions, con­trol­ling seizures, and lift­ing depres­sion that cog­ni­tion (mem­ory, atten­tion, plan­ning, prob­lem solv­ing) has been largely ignored. Granted, var­i­ous neu­rolep­tics, anti­con­vul­sants, anti­de­pres­sants, seda­tives, and stim­u­lants do have an effect on cog­ni­tion, but it is an ancil­lary effect of a drug designed to treat some­thing else.

Alzheimer’s dis­ease and other demen­tias have been society’s wake-up call. Here, in the most afflu­ent coun­try in the most afflu­ent of times, human minds were suc­cumb­ing to decay before human bod­ies, a sharp chal­lenge to the tacit pop­u­lar belief that the “body is frail but soul is for­ever.” This pro­vided an impe­tus for the devel­op­ment of an entirely new class of drugs, which can be termed famil­ially as “cog­notropic.” Their pri­mary and explicit pur­pose is to improve cognition.

Since med­ical and pub­lic pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with demen­tia focuses on mem­ory, most of the phar­ma­co­log­i­cal efforts have been directed at improv­ing mem­ory. At the time of this writ­ing, a hand­ful of drugs known as “Alzheimer’s drugs” or “mem­ory enhancers” have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA). In real­ity, both des­ig­na­tions are some­what mis­lead­ing. The drugs in ques­tion are Read the rest of this entry »

Insur­ance com­pany All­state and brain fit­ness soft­ware devel­oper Posit Sci­ence just announced (see press release Pro­tect­ing Penn­syl­va­nia Dri­vers, One Brain at a Time) a very intel­li­gent initiative:

Video exer­cises aid dri­ving skills (Chicago Tribune)

-“All­state, which called the Posit pro­gram “poten­tially the next big break­through in auto­mo­bile safety,” said it expects its soft­ware exer­cises to reduce risky dri­ving maneu­vers by up to 40 per­cent and improve stop­ping dis­tance by an aver­age of 22 feet when trav­el­ing at 55 miles per hour.”

-“We’ll look to see whether over the next six to nine months there will be a reduc­tion in” the num­ber of acci­dents between the group par­tic­i­pat­ing in the video exer­cises and those sit­ting out, said Tom War­den, assis­tant vice pres­i­dent of Allstate’s research and plan­ning center.

I am for­tu­nate to inter­view Tom War­den, Assis­tant Vice Pres­i­dent and Leader of Allstate’s Research and Plan­ning Cen­ter, based in Menlo Park, California.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Tom, thank you for your time. Can you please explain the con­text behind this new ini­tia­tive that you just announced?

Tom War­den: Our research cen­ter is con­stantly look­ing for new ideas to improve the dri­ving behav­ior of dri­vers of all ages. Recently we have paid extra empha­sis on ways to improve the safety of older drivers.

Let me pro­vide some back­ground here. All­state, as a com­pany, has always been one of the pio­neers in help­ing to intro­duce new safety mea­sures. For exam­ple, we were among the pio­neers in the 60s to advo­cate for manda­tory use of seat­ing belts, given research stud­ies on the ben­e­fits for dri­vers and pas­sen­gers alike. More recently, we helped lobby for wider adop­tion of airbags, an effec­tive but expen­sive way of pro­tec­tion that only became main­stream when man­u­fac­tur­ers were required to include them.

Let’s talk now about your agree­ment with Posit Sci­ence. What will hap­pen over the next months?

The first thing we are doing is to con­duct a research study to ana­lyze the real-life impact of Posit Sci­ence InSight, a computer-based cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram, on acci­dent rates. We know that as dri­vers get older Read the rest of this entry »

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).

Sev­eral recent news (includ­ing video of our recent panel discussion):

1) Study Finds Improved Cog­ni­tive Health among Older Amer­i­cans (Jour­nal of the Alzheimer’s Association)

- “Soci­etal invest­ment in build­ing and main­tain­ing cog­ni­tive reserve through for­mal edu­ca­tion in child­hood and con­tin­ued cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion dur­ing work and leisure in adult­hood may help limit the bur­den of demen­tia among the grow­ing num­ber of older adults worldwide”.

- “Cog­ni­tive impair­ment dropped from 12.2 per­cent in 1993 to 8.7 per­cent in 2002 among peo­ple 70 and older.“ 

Read the rest of this entry »