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Time for the Octo­ber edi­tion of the monthly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing this time sev­eral arti­cles on the impact of stress, emo­tions, and self-regulation, on our brain’s struc­ture and performance.

We are pleased to bring to Sharp­Brains read­ers a new 6-part series on the Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress, based on a recent book by Sharp­Brains con­trib­u­tor Dr. Jerome Schultz. The first two parts are already avail­able: Part 1 — The Human Brain and How It Responds to Stress and Part 2 — Gray Mat­ters.

Brain Study Links Emo­tional Self-Regulation and Math Per­for­mance: A new study strongly sug­gests the need to “help stu­dents reap­praise the sit­u­a­tion and con­trol emo­tions before they even get into a task”. While the study focused on math anx­i­ety and per­for­mance, the impli­ca­tions are rel­e­vant out­side the class­room too.

Reminder: Brain Fit­ness Q&A Ses­sions in Novem­ber: As we announced a few weeks ago, we are hon­ored to present an upcom­ing Brain Fit­ness Q&A Series. The first ses­sion, fea­tur­ing Dr. Gary Small, will take place Novem­ber 1st, 2011, 2-3pm US Eeast­ern Time. Please mark your cal­en­dar and join us at sharpbrains.com then! (no need to do any­thing prior to the session).

Music Train­ing Can Enhance Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion: Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence on the value of music train­ing (vs. sim­ply lis­ten­ing to music).

Gam­ing and Neu­ro­science: Oppor­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges: A sum­mary of impres­sions by researcher  Aki Niko­laidis based on his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the recent con­fer­ence Enter­tain­ment Soft­ware and Cog­ni­tive Neu­rother­a­peu­tics Con­fer­ence (ESCoNS) at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia San Francisco.

Fam­i­lies’ Per­spec­tives on ADHD and its Treat­ment: Dr. David Rabiner presents new data on fam­i­lies’ expe­ri­ence with ADHD and its treatment.

Brain Games and Opti­cal Illu­sions @ National Geo­graphic: Sev­eral Sharp­Brains friends rec­om­mend this recent 3-part National Geo­graphic TV mini-series.

Math Brain Teaser for Kids and Adults: Archimedes Grave: A fun puz­zle to exer­cise our brains a bit, sub­mit­ted by new con­trib­u­tor Maria Lando. Enjoy!

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 »

In recent years, we have wit­nessed the begin­nings of a rev­o­lu­tion in edu­ca­tion.  Tech­nol­ogy has fun­da­men­tally altered the way we do many things in daily life, but it is just start­ing to make head­way in chang­ing the way we teach.  Just as tele­vi­sion shows like Sesame Street enhanced the pas­sive learn­ing of infor­ma­tion for kids by teach­ing in a fun for­mat, elec­tronic games offer to greatly enhance the way kids and adults are taught by actively engag­ing them in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: the recent trade book Com­puter Games and Instruc­tion brings together the lead­ing edge per­spec­tives of over a dozen sci­en­tists in the area of videogames and learn­ing, includ­ing a very insight­ful analy­sis –excerpted below– by Harvard’s Chris Dede. Please pay atten­tion to his thoughts on scal­a­bil­ity below, and enjoy!)

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The research overview pro­vided by Tobias, Fletcher, and Dai (this vol­ume) is very help­ful in sum­ma­riz­ing stud­ies to date on var­i­ous dimen­sions of edu­ca­tional games and sim­u­la­tions. The next chal­lenge for the field is to move beyond iso­lated research in which each group of inves­ti­ga­tors uses an idio­syn­cratic set of def­i­n­i­tions, con­cep­tual frame­works, and meth­ods. Instead, to make fur­ther progress, we as schol­ars should adopt com­mon research strate­gies and models—not only to ensure a higher stan­dard of rigor, but also to enable stud­ies that com­ple­ment each other in what they explore.   Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the research behind the book The Sharp­Brains Guide for Brain Fit­ness we inter­viewed dozens of lead­ing cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness sci­en­tists and experts world­wide to learn about their research and thoughts, and have a num­ber of take-aways to report.

What can we clearly say today that we couldn’t have said only 10 years ago? That what neu­ro­science pio­neer San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal claimed in the XX cen­tury, “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor his own brain”, may well become real­ity in the XXI.

And trans­form Edu­ca­tion, Health, Train­ing, and Gam­ing in the process, since Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: this is one of the Research Exec­u­tive Briefs that will be included in Sharp­Brains’ 2010 mar­ket report, to be unveiled on May 24th. We asked lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tists to share find­ings and impli­ca­tions from their own recent pub­lished sci­en­tific stud­ies in order to bet­ter fore­cast the devel­op­ment tra­jec­tory of emerg­ing appli­ca­tions for cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness. Money quote: “This high­lights the need for spe­cial atten­tion in the choice of the games to be used when con­sid­er­ing poten­tial real-world applications.”)

Brief pre­pared by: Bjron Hubert-Wallander, Bjorn & Daphne Bave­lier, Bave­lier Brain & Vision Lab, Uni­ver­sity of Rochester.

1. Main find­ings for 2008 and 2009:

Over the past ten years, research con­ducted by our lab and oth­ers has shown that play­ing fast-paced, action-packed videogames can lead to sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits in how well one pays atten­tion and how well one sees. Specif­i­cally, our stud­ies have shown that train­ing for as lit­tle as ten hours on action video games (like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Unreal Tour­na­ment) can lead to mea­sur­able enhance­ments in our abil­ity to spread our atten­tion around the visual field, our abil­ity to keep track of mul­ti­ple mov­ing objects, and our abil­ity to pick out rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from a rapid sequence of visual events. Most recently though, we have shown that action videogame train­ing can also pos­i­tively affect more basic aspects of vision such as our abil­ity to resolve small details or see faint patterns.

Pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science in 2009, one of our stud­ies com­pared two groups of college-aged males, those who had a his­tory of play­ing action videogames and those who had very rarely or had never played videogames at all. By ana­lyz­ing both groups’ per­for­mance on a task designed to Read the rest of this entry »

Round-up of recent news with a vari­ety of angles, from the effects of gam­ing to cog­ni­tive train­ing for dri­ving skills and brain fit­ness classes.

Seniors use brain train­ing soft­ware to sharpen their minds (Dal­las Morn­ing News)

- “All­state Insur­ance has invited some pol­i­cy­hold­ers and other older dri­vers to try InSight so researchers can eval­u­ate whether the soft­ware reduces accidents.”

- “Depend­ing on the results, the auto insurer says it may expand the pilot project and offer pre­mium dis­counts to dri­vers who take the brain training.”

- “Today, only one in seven licensed dri­vers is 65 or older. But by 2030, when the last of the boomers turn 65, the pro­por­tion will be one in four. ”

Brain games (Palo Alto Weekly)

- “There is research that jus­ti­fies the belief that games can aid the brain’s health, accord­ing to Dr. Wal­ter Bortz II, a Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine asso­ciate pro­fes­sor and expert on longevity and robust aging. Stud­ies show that stim­u­lat­ing the brain by learn­ing new tasks increases blood fac­tors in the brain that act like steroids, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for the brain to grow even in old age

- “Called “brain plas­tic­ity,” such growth is the foun­da­tion of brain-fitness soft­ware research.”

Brain Fit­ness Classes Keep Seniors Men­tally And Socially Active (Wash­ing­ton Post)

- “More options for exer­cis­ing the brain are on the way. Last year, the Ontario gov­ern­ment pledged about $8 mil­lion to develop a brain fit­ness cen­ter in Toronto. In San Fran­cisco, Jan Zivic, a for­mer exec­u­tive search con­sul­tant, opened a cen­ter, vibrant­Brains, that offers mem­ory improve­ment classes and work­shops. Zivic was inspired by help she got from brain fit­ness games she played after being injured in an auto­mo­bile accident.”

The 15 Clear­est Ben­e­fits of Gam­ing (Edge Magazine)

-“But Fer­nan­dez warns that the gamer gen­er­a­tion isn’t auto­mat­i­cally guar­an­teed to have bet­ter cog­ni­tive health than their grand­par­ents. Cog­ni­tive fit­ness (hav­ing the men­tal abil­i­ties required to thrive in cog­ni­tively more com­plex envi­ron­ments) seems to depend on four major pil­lars: nutri­tion, phys­i­cal exer­cise, stress man­age­ment and men­tal exer­cise. All these fac­tors have phys­i­cal effects on our brains (for exam­ple, phys­i­cal exer­cise con­tributes to the cre­ation of new neu­rons, while stress and anx­i­ety pre­vents and/or reduces the cre­ation of new neu­rons). The bad news is that we have grow­ing obe­sity rates and anx­i­ety among young peo­ple. So, games are great for men­tal exer­cise, but we shouldn’t for­get the other ingre­di­ents for cog­ni­tive fitness.

- “Fer­nan­dez muses, Indeed fun can be seen as a goal in itself . The prob­lem is that we con­fuse gam­ing as a vehi­cle with gam­ing as con­tent. Gam­ing as vehi­cle is arguably great it allows for inter­ac­tiv­ity, engage­ment. Gam­ing as con­tent, well, it depends. It is not the same to play a bloody shooter game as it is to Tetris or Rise of Nations, so the field should do a bet­ter job at explain­ing to main­stream soci­ety the diver­sity of games and dis­pel some myths.

More Brain Fit­ness and Cog­ni­tive Health News

Wel­come to Encephalon 50th edi­tion, where you will find another superb col­lec­tion of blog posts on all things Brain and Mind.

Enjoy these contributions:

Sci­ence & Technology

Mind Hacks reports that Face­book ate my psy­chi­a­trist. We can learn about the ben­e­fits of social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, bring­ing great per­spec­tive to recent and mis­guided media spec­u­la­tion (fuelled by a recent talk at the Royal Col­lege of Psy­chi­a­trists). Vaughan, will you please report on the ben­e­fits of par­tic­i­pat­ing (and, bet­ter, host­ing) Encephalon?.

Dun­geons And Drag­ons — Or Mazes And Mon­sters?: Pod­Black Cat offers a thought-provoking review of the ther­apy (includ­ing self-therapy) appli­ca­tions of role-playing games such as the clas­sic Dun­geons And Drag­ons and the more recent mas­sively mul­ti­player online games.

Cog­ni­tive Daily cov­ers another type of game. Read the rest of this entry »

Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our 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).

Brain Fit­ness News and Events

Upcom­ing Events: I will be speak­ing at five Health, Edu­ca­tion and Gam­ing events over the next cou­ple of months to intro­duce find­ings from our recent mar­ket report. Please intro­duce your­self if you attend any of these events.

Pre­vent­ing Mem­ory Loss-Special Issue: Con­gres­sional Quar­terly Researcher, one of the main pub­li­ca­tions on Capi­tol Hill, pub­lished an impres­sive 24-page spe­cial issue titled Pre­vent­ing Mem­ory Loss. Highly rec­om­mended if you want to be on top of the lat­est research trends and their pol­icy implications.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is an event you may be inter­ested in, if you are based in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area.

The MIT Club of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, The Busi­ness Forum on Aging and Smart­Sil­vers presents:

The Emerg­ing Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket:  Build­ing Bet­ter Brains (Con­tact infor­ma­tion and Reg­is­tra­tion Here)

Date: 02/12/2008 Tues­day
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Wil­son Son­sini
Loca­tion: 950 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto
Cost: $20 online, $25 walk-in

Con­tact infor­ma­tion and Reg­is­tra­tion Here.

Here is the buzz  Sci­en­tific, tech­no­log­i­cal and demo­graphic trends have con­verged to cre­ate an excit­ing new mar­ket in brain fit­ness, where soft­ware and online appli­ca­tions can assess and train cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. That equates to a sharper mind and bet­ter mem­ory reten­tion con­tribut­ing to health­ier aging.  There is cur­rently a $400m world­wide mar­ket with high growth ahead predicted.

Join us in lively and infor­ma­tive dis­cus­sions as Alvaro Fer­nan­dez; CEO of SharpBrains.com sum­ma­rizes the sci­ence, key mar­ket seg­ments, play­ers and trends, based on the first Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket Report, pre­sented in this event.  He will dis­cuss the impli­ca­tions with sev­eral neuro-technology, gam­ing experts and investors.”  Mod­er­ated by Zack Lynch, the speaker and panel will dis­cuss: Read the rest of this entry »