The same way a brain fit­ness soft­ware pro­gram can help increase dri­ving safety for older adults, sim­ple cog­ni­tive tests may help deter­mine whether a per­son can drive safely after a stroke.

A recent study ana­lyzed 30 pre­vi­ous stud­ies in which the par­tic­i­pants’ dri­ving skills after a stroke were tested in an on-road eval­u­a­tion. 1,728 indi­vid­u­als with an aver­age age of 61 were involved. On aver­age, 9 months had passed between the stroke and the dri­ving eval­u­a­tion. Note that 54 per­cent of the par­tic­i­pants passed the on-road evaluation.

The authors of the analy­sis looked for tests scores that could pre­dict the actual dri­ving eval­u­a­tion out­come. They iden­ti­fied 3 sim­ple cog­ni­tive tests that did quite well: Read the rest of this entry »

A study just pub­lished in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Geri­atric Soci­ety has been much pub­li­cized recently (see for instance, this L.A. Times arti­cle). The study showed that a computer-based brain train­ing pro­gram suc­ceeded in reduc­ing at-fault car crashes for older dri­vers. The effects of the train­ing lasted over 6 years.

This result made the news as one of the rare trans­fers of brain train­ing ben­e­fits to every­day life.  Why was this train­ing suc­cess­ful and not oth­ers? Prob­a­bly because brain train­ing needs to be spe­cific and not gen­eral. If you prac­tice play­ing base­ball you do not expect to get bet­ter at play­ing bas­ket­ball, right? The same is true of brain func­tions: If you train your lan­guage skills, do not expect to get bet­ter at mem­o­riz­ing num­bers. Read the rest of this entry »

Good arti­cle in the New York Times today:
An Epi­demic of Crashes Among the Aging? Unlikely, Study Says

- “The (Insur­ance Insti­tute for High­way Dri­ving) insur­ance insti­tute is con­duct­ing fur­ther research to deter­mine why the risks appear to be going down for older dri­vers. It may be that today’s older dri­vers are sim­ply in bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal shape than their coun­ter­parts a decade ago, so they are not only less likely to make a dri­ving mis­take, but also less frail and bet­ter able to sur­vive injuries.”

There is no doubt that, as a group, older per­sons of any given age are in bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal shape today than their coun­ter­parts years ago. For con­text, world­wide life expectancy has increased more than 20 years in less than 6o years — so you can imag­ine how a per­son in his or her early 70s today is in bet­ter shape than some­one in his or her mid-60s a few decades back.

Still, as the num­ber of peo­ple over the age of 60 starts to grow expo­nen­tially given the influx of baby boomers, soci­ety at large will prob­a­bly ben­e­fit from start­ing to think through 1) what are the types of pro­grams, whether intro­duced and man­aged by the AARP, DMV or car insur­ance com­pa­nies, that can help older adults drive safely for as long as they want and need, 2) what are the mech­a­nisms to pre­vent hav­ing dri­vers in our roads who don’t pos­sess the min­i­mum per­cep­tual and cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties required to drive “safely” (and what “safely” really means).

And, yes, we should prob­a­bly have a sim­i­lar con­ver­sa­tion regard­ing teenage dri­ving.
For related read­ing, you may enjoy these 2 articles:

- All­state: Can we improve Dri­ver Safety using Posit Sci­ence InSight?

- Improv­ing Dri­ving Skills and Brain Func­tion­ing– Inter­view with ACTIVE’s Jerri Edwards

Dri­ving as Next Brain Fit­ness Application? 

Last month, at the MIT/ Smart­Sil­vers event where we pre­sented our Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket Report, we dis­cussed what spe­cific appli­ca­tions, beyond the cur­rent empha­sis on healthy aging, might take com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing to a new level.  

Assess­ing and improv­ing dri­ving skills would be a top can­di­date, given both the well-defined nature of the need and the appear­ance of pro­grams with grow­ing evi­dence (both sci­en­tific and real-world) behind.

The New York Times Asks… 

Along these lines, the New York Times just published this arti­cle: Are You a Good Dri­ver? Here’s How to Find Out. A few quotes:

- “COULD a video game make you a bet­ter dri­ver? More impor­tant, could com­puter soft­ware pre­vent teenagers from mak­ing fatal mis­takes or even weed out older dri­vers whose debil­i­ties make them crash-prone?”

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 »

As we have been doing for the last 6 months, here you are have the Monthly Digest of our Most Pop­u­lar Blog Posts. You can con­sider it your monthly Brain Fitness/ Train­ing Newsletter.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: the brain’s abil­ity to reor­ga­nize itself by form­ing new con­nec­tions through­out life. (see more con­cepts in our Glos­sary).

We coudn’t be hap­pier about the grow­ing num­ber of books pop­u­lar­iz­ing the key lessons about brain train­ing that Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg has been research­ing and writ­ing about for years, and that moti­vated us to embark our­selves in the Sharp­Brains adventure.

Dis­cover Mag­a­zine presents a great arti­cle, Rewiring the Brain, review­ing two recent books.

• The sub­ti­tle is “Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity can allow for treat­ment of senil­ity, post-traumatic stress, ­obsessive-compulsive dis­or­der, and depres­sion and Bud­dhists have been cap­i­tal­iz­ing on it for mil­lenia.” I would add that the strong value of life­long learn­ing present in jesuit and jew­ish tra­di­tions reflects the same wis­dom. Some quotes:
• “Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Bal­lan­tine Books, $24.95) by sci­ence jour­nal­ist Sharon Beg­ley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psy­chi­a­trist Nor­man Doidge, offer mas­ter­fully guided tours through the bur­geon­ing field of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research. Each has its own style and empha­sis; both are excellent.”
• “Finally, both authors con­clude that adult neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is a vastly under­tapped resource, one with which West­ern med­i­cine and psy­chol­ogy are just now com­ing to grips. An impor­tant emerg­ing research agenda is to Read the rest of this entry »