Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on holis­tic brain health with clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist Dr. Paul Nuss­baum, author of Save Your Brain. You can learn more about the full Brain Fit­ness Q&A Series Here.

Per­haps one of the best exchanges was: Read the rest of this entry »

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on life­long cog­ni­tive fit­ness, “men­tal cap­i­tal­ism”, and more,  with Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, co-author of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, mod­er­ated by Harry Moody, Direc­tor of Aca­d­e­mic Affairs at AARP. You learn more about upcom­ing Brain Fit­ness Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Read the rest of this entry »

NIH-funded study finds dyslexia not tied to IQ (NIH press release):

At left, brain areas active in typ­i­cally devel­op­ing read­ers engaged in a rhyming task. Shown at right is the brain area acti­vated in poor read­ers involved in the same task.

- “Regard­less of high or low over­all scores on an IQ test, chil­dren with dyslexia show sim­i­lar pat­terns of brain activ­ity, accord­ing to researchers sup­ported by the National Insti­tutes of Health. The results call into ques­tion the dis­crep­ancy model — the prac­tice of clas­si­fy­ing a child as dyslexic on the basis of a lag between read­ing abil­ity and over­all IQ scores.”

- “In many school sys­tems, the dis­crep­ancy model is the cri­te­rion for Read the rest of this entry »

Think­ing glob­ally to improve men­tal health: NIH announces inter­na­tional research ini­tia­tive (press release):

- “The Grand Chal­lenges in Global Men­tal Health Ini­tia­tive, led by the National Insti­tutes of Health and the Global Alliance for Chronic Dis­eases, has iden­ti­fied the top 40 bar­ri­ers to bet­ter men­tal health around the world. Sim­i­lar to past grand chal­lenges, which Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to make eleven impor­tant announce­ments about the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit…eleven addi­tional rea­sons to con­sider reg­is­ter­ing and join­ing our event and com­mu­nity next week.

1. Intel Cor­po­ra­tion, the “Spon­sors of Tomor­row™”, and Lumos Labs have become Sum­mit Gold Sponsors.
2. Sharp­Brains will issue a Cer­tifi­cate of Atten­dance to par­tic­i­pants (20 hours of con­tin­u­ing education).
3. Jamie Wil­son shares 20 rea­sons why vir­tual con­fer­ences are the future.
4. NIH/ NIA Pro­gram Chief Molly Wag­ster will dis­cuss the new NIH Tool­box for Assess­ment of Neu­ro­log­i­cal and Behav­ioral Function.
5. Yaakov Stern (Colum­bia), David Darby (CogState), Keith Wesnes (United BioSource) and Jef­frey Kaye (Orcat­ech) will explore The Role of Cog­ni­tive Health Mon­i­tor­ing Systems.
6. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (Sharp­Brains) and Muki Hansteen-Izora (Intel Cor­po­ra­tion) will ana­lyze The State of Inno­va­tion and Emerg­ing Marketplace.
7. You can still Reg­is­ter and obtain a com­pli­men­tary copy of Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket 2010 (which includes mar­ket data, ven­dor analy­sis, inno­va­tion case stud­ies, research briefs, and more.)
8. Michael Merzenich (UCSF), Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Har­vard), Wal­ter Green­leaf (Vir­tu­ally­Bet­ter) and Kate Sul­li­van (Wal­ter Reed) will dis­cuss how Inno­va­tion gets From Lab to Marketplace.
9. Lumos Labs, Brain Resource, Cogmed, Bay­crest, Cog­niFit, and Posit Sci­ence will present their lat­est tools and solu­tions dur­ing Expo Day.
10. A total of 19 excel­lent Sum­mit Part­ners help us expand Summit’s reach and influence.
11. We are plan­ning April/ May social gath­er­ings for Sum­mit par­tic­i­pants in 5 cities: San Fran­cisco, Los Ange­les, Wash­ing­ton DC, NYC, and Toronto, and will help facil­i­tate gath­er­ings in any city/ region with at least 10 Sum­mit participants.

Please visit the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit web­site to Learn More and Reg­is­ter.

Also, please fol­low us via Twit­ter and spread the word about the Sum­mit using hash­tag #svs11

We look for­ward to “meet­ing” many of you next week! Please remem­ber you can enter dis­count code sharp2011 in order to get 15% off reg­is­tra­tion fees.

Here you have the July edi­tion of our monthly eNewslet ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this free Brain Fit­ness eNewslet­ter by email, using the box in the right column.

Tech­nol­ogy to upgrade brain care: In this exten­sive inter­view, Dr. John Docherty helps con­nect the dots on why new frame­works and tools are a must to put recent brain research to good use. A must read for all pro­fes­sion­als in the field.

Research

Find­ings from NIH Expert Panel: The Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging asked Alvaro Fer­nan­dez to com­ment on the find­ings from a major cog­ni­tive health research review by the National Insti­tutes of Health. Lifestyle still mat­ters, and pro­tec­tive fac­tors against cog­ni­tive decline are led by cog­ni­tive train­ing, phys­i­cal activ­ity and cog­ni­tive engagement.

Sci­en­tific cri­tique of BBC brain train­ing exper­i­ment: Dr. Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski shares her con­cerns about the April 2010 BBC study, which included sub­stan­tial and unex­plained dropout rates, and ques­tion­able out­come mea­sure­ment and interpretation.

The value of being bilin­gual and build­ing a Cog­ni­tive Reserve to pre­serve learn­ing and mem­ory even in the face of brain dam­age are explored in recent studies.

San Fran­cisco Bay Area study seeks par­tic­i­pants: The Gaz­za­ley Lab at UCSF is look­ing for par­tic­i­pants aged 20–59 to explore the impact of dis­trac­tion and mul­ti­task­ing on per­for­mance across the lifespan.

Inno­va­tion

What impressed Inno­va­tion Awards Judg­ing Panel: Get some insight into what most impressed the Judg­ing Panel about each Win­ner and Final­ist of the 2010 Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion Awards.

New — Sharp­Brains’ 2010 Mar­ket Report:  Sharp­Brains’ flag­ship, 207-page, third annual mar­ket report finds con­tin­ued growth for dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies to assess, enhance and treat cognition.

To man­age brain fit­ness through life, we need to put puz­zle pieces together: inno­v­a­tive tools to help us bet­ter mon­i­tor our cog­ni­tive health and take informed action are badly needed.…and already emerging.

The inter­net will fry your brain. Sure: In his lat­est book, Nicholas Carr does a great job high­light­ing the impli­ca­tions of life­long neuro­plasticity, but picks the wrong enemy.

“Seri­ous Games”:  Can video games inspire peo­ple to per­form acts of altru­ism? Kyle Smith reports.

Teasers

Yahoo Opti­cal Illu­sions and teasers: Yahoo! has cre­ated an expanded sec­tion of illu­sions and teasers, and we were glad to con­tribute to it. Enjoy…and have a great summer!

In late April 2010, an inde­pen­dent expert panel orga­nized by the NIH released a thought­ful report on the state of the sci­ence for pre­ven­tion of Alzheimer’s Dis­ease and cog­ni­tive decline*. The report sum­ma­rizes the panel’s review of the sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture by saying:

“Firm con­clu­sions can­not be drawn about the asso­ci­a­tion of mod­i­fi­able risk fac­tors with cog­ni­tive decline or Alzheimer’s disease.”

Which was basi­cally reported as “noth­ing can pre­vent Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Which is very true. And also very dif­fer­ent from what most read­ers may assume it means.

Note: You can keep read­ing the arti­cle What the recent NIH Expert Panel on Alzheimer’s Pre­ven­tion Means – and Doesn’t Mean in the web­site of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Aging (arti­cle link opens PDF). ASA recently asked me to write a cou­ple of arti­cles on lat­est brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive health trends for their Min­dAlert ini­tia­tive, and this is the first of two.

(Editor’s note: Sharp­Brains Sum­mit attendee Steve Zanon wrote a very insight­ful com­ment to our pre­vi­ous post regard­ing the NIH inde­pen­dent panel on Alzheimer’s/ cog­ni­tive decline pre­ven­tion. We repub­lish com­ment here for eas­ier access.)

In the intro­duc­tions on day one of the NIH con­fer­ence Jenifer Croswell from OMAR out­lined three dif­fer­ent frames of ref­er­ence and deci­sion mak­ing in this con­text. She men­tioned (1) the indi­vid­ual and fam­ily based on per­sonal val­ues, (2) com­mu­nity doc­tors affect­ing their patients, and (3) rec­om­men­da­tions for an entire pop­u­la­tion of peo­ple which should only con­tain strong evi­den­tiary based infor­ma­tion. She indi­cated that this con­fer­ence would pro­duce a state­ment based on the third con­text and in that respect the panel has done a great job in high­light­ing the gaps that gov­ern­ment, indus­try & research need to focus on in order to most effec­tively move forward.

How­ever some good news for indi­vid­u­als did come out of the con­fer­ence. Pages 7 & 8 of the “Sys­tem­atic Evi­dence Review” (link opens new win­dow where you can down­load report as PDF) pro­vides a great snap­shot of all the asso­ci­ated fac­tors con­sid­ered at the con­fer­ence and their cur­rent sta­tus in terms of level of evi­dence. This doc­u­ment sum­marises the research from 25 sys­tem­atic reviews and 250 pri­mary research stud­ies which were fil­tered from searches that located 6907 cita­tions. The stud­ies were eval­u­ated for eli­gi­bil­ity and qual­ity, and data were abstracted on study design, demo­graph­ics, inter­ven­tion or pre­dic­tor fac­tor, and cog­ni­tive out­comes. The final report was peer reviewed. In terms of inde­pen­dence and weight of evi­dence this doc­u­ment is likely to pro­vide the strongest posi­tion on the sub­ject that we have today.

If we under­stand that all this evi­dence is still build­ing but clearly has strong direc­tion then I believe it is a good base­line (as of today) from which indi­vid­u­als may begin to make lifestyle choices. Of course as research pro­gresses the base­line will change but for now I think it is a solid foun­da­tion from which to work. Per­sonal pref­er­ences would guide choices but where the direc­tion of asso­ci­a­tion is cat­e­gorised as …..

• “no evi­dence” we should prob­a­bly con­sider ignoring
• “inad­e­quate evi­dence” we should prob­a­bly con­sider treat­ing as suspicious
• “increas­ing or decreas­ing risk” we should prob­a­bly con­sider to be strongly asso­ci­ated (but not defin­i­tive) and there­fore offer­ing promis­ing (but not cer­tain) lifestyle choices

So with any good risk man­age­ment strat­egy our best bet is to diver­sify risk across sev­eral of the most likely fac­tors. The “Sys­tem­atic Evi­dence Review” clearly iden­ti­fies the most likely risk fac­tors. We don’t have cer­tainty but we do have direc­tion and I think that is an encour­ag­ing mes­sage for the public.

The good news for those inter­ested in brain train­ing is that in the find­ings for cog­ni­tive decline (page 8), cog­ni­tive train­ing has the high­est level of evidence.

—

Rec­om­mended read­ing:  “Sys­tem­atic Evi­dence Review” of fac­tors that can decrease or increase risk of Alzheimer’s Dis­ease and cog­ni­tive decline, by NIH inde­pen­dent panel

via Press release:

The Research Part­ner­ship in Cog­ni­tive Aging, a public-private effort to pro­mote the study of brain func­tion with age, will award up to $28 mil­lion over five years to 17 research grants to exam­ine the neural and behav­ioral pro­files of healthy cog­ni­tive aging and explore inter­ven­tions that may pre­vent, reduce or reverse cog­ni­tive decline in older people.

The part­ner­ship, led by the National Insti­tute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Insti­tutes of Health, and the McK­night Brain Research Foun­da­tion (MBRF), is seek­ing ways to main­tain cog­ni­tive health — the abil­ity to think, learn and remem­ber — into old age.

Hodes pointed out that emerg­ing evi­dence sug­gests that cer­tain inter­ven­tions — such as exer­cise, envi­ron­men­tal enrich­ment, diet, social engage­ment, cog­ni­tive train­ing and stress reduc­tion — should be stud­ied more inten­sively to deter­mine if they might pre­vent or reduce declines in cog­ni­tive health.

All the stud­ies are fas­ci­nat­ing, and a few of them may have sig­nif­i­cant impact in the near-term given mar­ket trends:

• Ellen F. Binder, M.D., and Mark A. McDaniel, Ph.D., Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine, St. Louis: Com­bin­ing Exer­cise and Cog­ni­tive Train­ing to Improve Every­day Func­tion. A pilot trial in 90 older adults will eval­u­ate whether cog­ni­tion improves when aer­o­bic exer­cise is com­bined with cog­ni­tive enrich­ment pro­vided by a spe­cific research-based video game. The ran­dom­ized trial is aimed at find­ing an inter­ven­tion to improve day-to-day cog­ni­tive function.
• Mark D’Esposito, M.D., Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley: A Brain-Based Approach to Enhanc­ing Exec­u­tive Con­trol Func­tions in Healthy Aging
• Patri­cia A. Boyle, Ph.D., Rush Uni­ver­sity Med­ical Cen­ter, Chicago: Char­ac­ter­iz­ing the Behav­ior Pro­file of Healthy Cog­ni­tive Aging
• Randy L. Buck­ner, Ph.D., Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal, Boston: Neural Processes Under­ly­ing Cog­ni­tive Aging
• Joe Z. Tsien, Ph.D., Med­ical Col­lege of Geor­gia, Augusta: Hip­pocam­pal Net­work Pro­files of Mem­ory Aging.
• Yaakov Stern, Ph.D., Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, New York: Com­bined Exer­cise and Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Inter­ven­tion in Nor­mal Aging

For more information

• Press release: Here
• Web­site: Research Part­ner­ship in Cog­ni­tive Aging

My two cents:

• Why $28 mil­lion and not, say, $300m (one dol­lar per liv­ing Amer­i­can who tomor­row will be one day older than he or she is today)?
• Why the main empha­sis on “pre­vent, reduce or reverse decline” and not on “develop, build, main­tain functionality”?

(Editor’s Note: In 1990, Con­gress des­ig­nated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain.” Pres­i­dent George H. W. Bush pro­claimed, “A new era of dis­cov­ery is dawn­ing in brain research.” Dur­ing the ensu­ing decade, sci­en­tists greatly advanced our under­stand­ing of the brain. The edi­tors of Cere­brum asked the direc­tors of seven brain-related insti­tutes at the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH) to iden­tify the biggest advances, great­est dis­ap­point­ments, and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties of brain research in the past decade—the decade after the “Decade of the Brain.” They also asked them what looks most promis­ing for the com­ing decade, the 2010s. Experts focused on research that might change how doc­tors diag­nose and treat human brain disorders.)

Neu­ro­science is at a his­toric turn­ing point. Today, a full decade after the “Decade of the Brain,” a con­tin­u­ous stream of advances is shat­ter­ing long-held notions about how the human brain works and what hap­pens when it doesn’t. These advances are also reshap­ing the land­scapes of other fields, from psy­chol­ogy to eco­nom­ics, edu­ca­tion and the law.

Until the Decade of the Brain, sci­en­tists believed that, once devel­op­ment was over, the adult brain under­went very few changes. This per­cep­tion con­tributed to polar­iz­ing per­spec­tives on whether genet­ics or envi­ron­ment deter­mines a person’s tem­pera­ment and per­son­al­ity, apti­tudes, and vul­ner­a­bil­ity to men­tal dis­or­ders. But dur­ing the past two decades, neu­ro­sci­en­tists have steadily built the case that the human brain, even when fully mature, is far more plastic—changing and malleable—than we orig­i­nally thought.1 It turns out that the brain (at all ages) is highly respon­sive to envi­ron­men­tal stim­uli and that con­nec­tions between neu­rons are dynamic and can rapidly change within min­utes of stimulation.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is mod­u­lated in part by Read the rest of this entry »