Great arti­cle in the New York Times titled Train­ing Young Brains to Behave. A cou­ple of quotes:

- “But just as biol­ogy shapes behav­ior, so behav­ior can accel­er­ate biol­ogy. And a small group of edu­ca­tional and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists now say that men­tal exer­cises of a cer­tain kind can teach chil­dren to become more self-possessed at ear­lier ages, reduc­ing stress lev­els at home and improv­ing their expe­ri­ence in school. Researchers can test this abil­ity, which they call exec­u­tive func­tion, and they say it is more strongly asso­ci­ated with school suc­cess than I.Q.”

- “We know that the pre­frontal cor­tex is not fully devel­oped until the 20s, and some peo­ple will ask, Read the rest of this entry »

You know your weight. And your phys­i­cal fit­ness. And a vari­ety of health-related metrics.

What about your brain fitness?

Two recent announce­ments bring out how the assess­ment of cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, or brain func­tions, is increas­ingly being done thanks to new com­put­er­ized options:

1) Last week, OptumHealth announced an exclu­sive 3-year agree­ment (esti­mated at $18m) with the Aus­tralian com­pany Brain Resource. OptumHealth will be embed­ding the Brain Resource plat­form into their over­all Behav­ioral Solu­tions program.

- OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions will work with Brain Resource to pro­vide clin­i­cians with a Web-based assess­ment that mea­sures gen­eral cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple process infor­ma­tion) and social cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple man­age their emo­tions). This 40-minute assess­ment is based on well-known and val­i­dated tests of mem­ory, atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tion, and response speed, and mood, social skills and emo­tional resilience.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inter­est­ing recent news:

For more on these news, and com­men­tary: Read the rest of this entry »

Cog­ni­tive train­ing (the basis for what we call “brain fit­ness” these days) has a wide array of appli­ca­tions. The most recent one, which is cap­tur­ing public’s imag­i­na­tion, monop­o­liz­ing media cov­er­age, and cre­at­ing cer­tain con­fu­sion, is Healthy Brain Aging. We are for­tu­nate to have Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, offer today his great voice to this con­ver­sa­tion. Enjoy!

- Alvaro
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Mind­ing the Aging Brain

– By Joshua R. Stein­er­man, M.D.

Sci­en­tists, philoso­phers, artists, and experts from all fields of human endeavor lament: it ain’t easy get­ting older. It? Do they refer to frailty and dis­abil­ity? To bod­ily dis­ease? To life at its essence?

It’s all in your head

The mind is not set in stone, but it is encased by bone. It’s really all about the brain, the hyphen in the mind-body conun­drum. That squishy gray neu­ronal jun­gle is the inter­face between inter­nal life and envi­ron­men­tal sen­sa­tions and stim­u­la­tion. As expected, the brain shows signs of aging just as a wrin­kled brow, a stooped pos­ture, or an arthritic fin­ger might. The most com­mon brain changes observed in aging and in age-associated neu­ropsy­chi­atric dis­ease include:

Read the rest of this entry »

Reader Theresa Cerulli just for­warded this Let­ter to the Edi­tor that she had sent to the New York Times and went unpub­lished. The let­ter addresses the OpEd men­tioned here (pitch­ing phys­i­cal vs. men­tal exer­cise), and refers to the Cogmed work­ing mem­ory train­ing pro­gram, whose results have been stud­ied in mul­ti­ple papers pub­lished in top med­ical and sci­en­tific jour­nals.

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Dear Edi­tor:

I applaud San­dra Aamodt and Sam Wang for throw­ing some cold water on the cur­rent brain fit­ness craze in their recent New York Times Mag­a­zine Opin­ion Edi­to­r­ial “Exer­cise on the Brain.”  They are cor­rect in label­ing the host of “men­tal fit­ness” prod­ucts that tar­get aging baby boomers as “inspired by sci­ence “  not to be con­fused with actu­ally proven by sci­ence. For the last 30 years, terms like “brain plas­tic­ity” have been widely and casu­ally used, cre­at­ing hype that risks drown­ing out the real break­throughs that brain researchers are mak­ing in this area.

How­ever, I would like to dis­tin­guish the “men­tal fit­ness” trend that Aamodt and Wang rightly crit­i­cize from actual researched-based cog­ni­tive train­ing such as the Cogmed pro­gram devel­oped in Swe­den. Unlike “men­tal fit­ness” pro­grams, cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams focus very nar­rowly on spe­cific cog­ni­tive func­tions that research has shown to be plas­tic. This is in stark con­trast to com­pil­ing a smat­ter­ing of exer­cises or activ­i­ties that are gen­er­ally thought to be Read the rest of this entry »

Who has not heard “Use It or Lose It”. Now, what is “It”? And, is “It” only one thing or a num­ber of inte­grated ele­ments, each of which are heav­ily involved in spe­cific “brain exer­cises”, and all of which are impor­tant to main­tain Brain Fit­ness.

Let’s review at a glance:

The brain is com­posed of 3 “brains” or main sub-systems, each named after the evo­lu­tion­ary moment in which the sub-system is believed to have appeared, and after which species we share that struc­ture with.

A) Neo­cor­tex, or Human Brain, is the most recent area, where we per­form high-level think­ing and com­plex inte­gra­tive tasks. Other mam­mals do have this part too, but in much smaller pro­por­tion of the whole brain vol­ume. B) Lim­bic Sys­tem, or Mam­malian Brain, crit­i­cal for emo­tions and for memory, C) Cere­bel­lum and Stem, or Rep­til­ian Brain, that reg­u­lates basic vital vari­ables such as breath­ing, heart­beat and motor coor­di­na­tion (Credit for pic: Arnold Key­ser­ling and R.C.L.)

B) Lim­bic sys­tem: emo­tions are gen­er­ated here, as well as the appetites and urges that help us sur­vive. For instance, the amyg­dala gets trig­gered to pre­pare us to deal with a threat­en­ing sit­u­a­tion, result­ing in our feel­ing of fear. The hip­pocam­pus is key in the for­ma­tion of mem­ory. (Credit: Sand­hills College)

A) The Neo­cor­tex is com­posed of -Frontal Lobes: or the CEO of the Mind, for sophis­ti­cated brain func­tions such as plan­ning and conceptualizing. -Pari­etal: deals with move­ment, the senses, and some forms of recog­ni­tion -Tem­po­ral: audi­tory processes and language -Occip­i­tal: visual pro­cess­ing cen­ter (credit: Morphonix)

When we exer­cise our brains, we put our Neu­rons in action. “Cells that fire together wire together”, mean­ing that synapses, or unions between neu­rons, get solid­i­fied the more often the respec­tive neu­rons “talk” to each other. (Credit: Peter Furstenberg)