Over the last few days we have seen an engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion going on. In a cou­ple of posts, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Posit Sci­ence brain fit­ness gym have left com­ments that have prompted me to ask a series of detailed ques­tions. I will present those ques­tions in a post, so they are eas­ier to find.

Eric, Henry: please address these ques­tions, so we all con­tribute to help­ing con­sumers and insti­tu­tions nav­i­gate through this emerg­ing land­scape of “brain fit­ness gyms” and sep­a­rate what is real today from what is promis­ing and may be real tomor­row. Read the rest of this entry »

The hol­i­days are approach­ing and you can expect many soft­ware and game devel­op­ers to adver­tise their prod­ucts aggres­sively, try­ing to get you buy their “brain train­ing” prod­ucts for you or as a gift for a loved one.

The good news is that there are more and more tools we can use to keep men­tally stim­u­lated and even train and improve spe­cific cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties (like pro­cess­ing speed, short-term mem­ory…). You may be read­ing about Nin­tendo Brain Age, Posit Sci­ence, Fast For­Word, Mind­Fit, Lumos­ity, Happy Neu­ron, MyBrain­Trainer, emWave, StressEraser and more. And, of course, there are also non-technology based interventions.

The bad news is that it is dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate mar­ket­ing from sci­en­tific claims, and to under­stand which one, if any, may be a good com­ple­ment to other healthy lifestyle choices.

To help you nav­i­gate this process, we are pub­lish­ing the Sharp­Brains Check­list below, based on dozens of inter­views with sci­en­tists, experts and consumers:

10 Ques­tions to Choose the Right Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for You (and a brief expla­na­tion of why each ques­tion is important)

* 1. Are there sci­en­tists, ide­ally neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists, and a sci­en­tific advi­sory board Read the rest of this entry »

Just released in Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can:
Mem­ory work­outs beat other com­puter games in study

Some quotes

• “Train­ing the brain with a com­puter work­out pro­gram may be bet­ter than clas­sic com­puter games at staving off age-related men­tal decline, sci­en­tists reported on Friday.”
• “Researchers in Israel com­pared how one brain-training pro­gram, Mind­Fit, fared ver­sus a work­out with a sam­pling of clas­sic com­puter games, such as the puz­zle game Tetris.”
• “The study, funded by a grant from game maker Cog­niFit Ltd., involved 121 vol­un­teers over 50 who used the Mind­Fit train­ing pro­gram or a sam­pling of com­puter games for three months.”
• “Both groups ben­e­fited, but the group using the Mind­Fit pro­gram showed a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in spa­tial short-term mem­ory, spa­tial learn­ing and focused attention.”
• “Improve­ment was espe­cially pro­nounced in users who started out with some form of cog­ni­tive decline.
• The find­ings, which were pre­sented on Fri­day at an Alzheimer’s con­fer­ence in Salzburg, Aus­tria, were sim­i­lar to a smaller study done at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia last year.”

Spe­cial Offer: For a lim­ited time, you can receive a com­pli­men­tary copy of our Brain Fit­ness 101 e-Guide: Answers to your Top 25 Ques­tions, writ­ten by Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg and Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, by sub­scrib­ing to our monthly newslet­ter. You can sub­scribe Here.

Related blog posts

- Brain Fit­ness: Novem­ber Monthly Digest: a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and links includ­ing news, resources, brain teasers, and more.

- Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity 101 and Brain Fit­ness Glos­sary: an overview of the emerg­ing sci­ence and some key con­cepts to under­stand it.

- Brain Train­ing Games and “Games”: a 10-Question Check­list on how to eval­u­ate pro­grams that make brain-related claims.

- Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science and Psy­chol­ogy Inter­view Series: in-depth inter­views with 11 sci­en­tists and experts in cog­ni­tive train­ing and brain fitness.

- Books on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and mem­ory train­ing: reviews of Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind, by Sharon Beg­ley, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Nor­man Doidge. Both books are fas­ci­nat­ing and pow­er­ful; each would have mer­ited appear­ing in the 2007 New York Times List of 100 Notable Books.

We wrote yes­ter­day about Grow­ing Super Ath­letes (each of our stu­dents) and how “Learn­ing” goes beyond what we typ­i­cally call “Edu­ca­tion”. One of the skills needed for suc­cess at school and life is emo­tional self-regulation, and a recent arti­cle on Sharp­Brains in La Opin­ion (main US-based Spanish-language news­pa­per) touched pre­cisely on that.

Below you have the link, and quotes, in Span­ish. The gist of the arti­cle is sim­i­lar to this pre­vi­ous arti­cle in Tech­nol­ogy & Learn­ing mag­a­zine: Take a Deep Breath: Biofeed­back soft­ware is help­ing stu­dents calm down for bet­ter test performance.

La Opin­ion arti­cle, by Lucero Amador: Secreto para tri­un­far en los exámenes

• “Cuando una per­sona está muy eno­jada o tensa, el lóbulo frontal del cere­bro resulta afec­tado por Read the rest of this entry »