Yes­ter­day we had a fun ses­sion on Brain Fit­ness dur­ing the Neu­rolead­er­ship Sum­mit tak­ing place now in San Fran­cisco, explor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to enhance per­for­mance and health of lead­ers and work­forces by deploy­ing both old tools (like breath­ing and med­i­ta­tion) and new ones (such as biofeed­back and database-driven per­son­al­ized brain train­ing solu­tions). Here are a cou­ple of the main ideas I wanted to introduce:

A. Let’s define Brain Fit­ness as an “inte­grated approach to enhance brain func­tion­al­ity”, com­bin­ing as appro­pri­ate lifestyle, inva­sive and non-invasive options. “Brain fit­ness” is above all an out­come, a cul­ture, sim­i­lar to “phys­i­cal fit­ness” (jok­ingly, I also said that “brain fit­ness” is the part of “phys­i­cal fit­ness” that “phys­i­cal fit­ness” doesn’t yet know what to do with)

B. Then, the ques­tion becomes, “what are the most impor­tant brain func­tions to enhance/ develop/ main­tain?”. Here I shared the fol­low­ing results Read the rest of this entry »

Bev­erly San­born, Vice Pres­i­dent of Pro­gram Devel­op­ment at Bel­mont Senior Liv­ing and sched­uled 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Speaker, could not finally speak at the Sum­mit (she was very well replaced by col­league Jeff DeBevec), but for­tu­nately we can share her thought­ful answers to the fol­low­ing four crit­i­cal questions.

1. How would you define “brain fit­ness” vs. “phys­i­cal fit­ness”?

Brain fit­ness and phys­i­cal fit­ness are inter­linked. Each enhances the other and both are essen­tial com­po­nents of suc­cess­ful aging. As we age, the abil­ity to cope with inex­orable chal­lenge to social-emotional-economic well-being is rooted in hav­ing a high level of men­tal alert­ness and a phys­i­cal body that func­tions effi­ciently. But fit­ness is not just a happy con­se­quence of a hardy gene pool. Fit­ness for both brain and brawn requires a com­mit­ted effort, a lot of stretch and sweat, and the con­stant push to reach beyond the com­fort zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Every Mon­day dur­ing the next 10 weeks we’ll dis­cuss here what lead­ing indus­try, sci­ence and pol­icy experts –all of whom will speak at the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit (March 30th — April 1st, 2011)– have to say about emerg­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges to address, over the next 10 years, the grow­ing brain-related soci­etal demands.

With­out fur­ther ado, here you have what four Sum­mit Speak­ers say…

—

Alvaro Pascual-Leone is the Direc­tor of the Berenson-Allen Cen­ter for Non-Invasive Brain Stim­u­la­tion at Har­vard Med­ical School.

1. How would you define “brain fit­ness” vs. “phys­i­cal fit­ness”?

Phys­i­cal fit­ness can refer to an over­all or gen­eral state of health and well-being. How­ever, it is also often used more specif­i­cally to refer to the abil­ity to per­form a given activ­ity, occu­pa­tion, or sport.

Sim­i­larly brain fit­ness might be used to refer to a gen­eral state of healthy, opti­mized brain func­tion, or a more spe­cific brain-based abil­ity to process cer­tain, spe­cific infor­ma­tion, enable cer­tain motor actions, or sup­port cer­tain cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. Impor­tantly though, I would argue Read the rest of this entry »

It is well known that phys­i­cal fit­ness train­ing can improve cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. A small study sur­pris­ingly sug­gests that it may work both ways: Cog­ni­tive train­ing may improve seniors’ phys­i­cal fit­ness, more specif­i­cally their walking-while-talking speed. Poor gait speed (i.e., walk­ing speed) is cor­re­lated with a higher prob­a­bil­ity of falls as well as with cog­ni­tive impair­ment. This study shows thus a promis­ing exam­ple of how the ben­e­fits of cog­ni­tive train­ing can trans­fer to a cru­cial everyday-life activity .

Twenty seniors, aged 70 or older par­tic­i­pated in the study. Ten of the seniors par­tic­i­pated in a com­put­er­ized brain fit­ness pro­gram (Mind­Fit, by Cog­niFit) three times weekly Read the rest of this entry »

There’s such a flood of very sig­nif­i­cant research stud­ies, edu­ca­tional resources and arti­cles related to brain health, it’s hard to keep track — even for us!

Let me intro­duce and quote some of the top Brain Health Stud­ies, Arti­cles and Resources pub­lished in March:

1) Cog­ni­tive Decline Begins In Late 20s, Study Sug­gests (Sci­ence Daily)

- “These pat­terns sug­gest that some types of men­tal flex­i­bil­ity decrease rel­a­tively early in adult­hood, but that how much knowl­edge one has, and the effec­tive­ness of inte­grat­ing it with one’s abil­i­ties, may increase through­out all of adult­hood if there are no patho­log­i­cal dis­eases,” Salt­house said.

- How­ever, Salt­house points out that there is a great deal of vari­ance from per­son to person

2) Cere­brum 2009: Emerg­ing Ideas in Brain Sci­ence — new book by the Dana Foun­da­tion that “explores the cut­ting edge of brain research and its impli­ca­tions in our every­day lives, in lan­guage under­stand­able to the gen­eral reader.”

A cou­ple of excel­lent chap­ters of direct rel­e­vance to everyone’s brain health are:
– Chap­ter 4: A Road Paved by Rea­son, by Eliz­a­beth Nor­ton Lasley

- Chap­ter 10: Neural Health: Is It Facil­i­tated by Work Force Par­tic­i­pa­tion?, by Denise Park, Ph.D

3) Stay­ing Sharp DVD Pro­gram: “Dr. Jor­dan Graf­man, chief of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Sec­tion at the National Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke out­side of Wash­ing­ton, DC, and a mem­ber of the Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives, is your guide as we cover what to expect from the aging brain and what we can do to ‘stay sharp.’

For a free DVD of this pro­gram you can con­tact stayingsharp@dana.org. (they say free in their web­site, I don’t know if that includes ship­ping & handling)

4) Dri­vers to be tested on cog­ni­tive abil­ity start­ing at age 75 (Japan Times)

The out­line of a cog­ni­tive test that dri­vers aged 75 or over will be required to take from June when renew­ing their licenses was released Thursday…The test is intended to reduce the num­ber of traf­fic acci­dents involv­ing elderly dri­vers by mea­sur­ing their cog­ni­tive level.

5) Phys­i­cal Fit­ness Improves Spa­tial Mem­ory, Increases Size Of Brain Struc­ture (Sci­ence Daily)

- “Now researchers have found that elderly adults who are more phys­i­cally fit tend to have big­ger hip­pocampi and bet­ter spa­tial mem­ory than those who are less fit.”

6) Brain Train­ers: A Work­out for the Mind (Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Mind)

“I recently tried out eight of the lat­est brain fit­ness pro­grams, train­ing with each for a week. The pro­grams ranged widely in focus, qual­ity and how fun they were to use. “Like phys­i­cal exer­cise equip­ment, a brain exer­cise pro­gram doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it, says Andrew J. Carle, direc­tor of the Pro­gram in Assisted Living/Senior Hous­ing Admin­is­tra­tion at George Mason Uni­ver­sity. And peo­ple tend not to use bor­ing equip­ment. “I remem­ber when Nor­dic­Track was the biggest thing out there. Every­one ran out and bought one, and 90 per­cent of them ended up as a clothes rack in the back of your bedroom.

The reporter used: Posit Science’s Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram Clas­sic, Hap­pyNeu­ron, Nin­tendo BrainAge, CogniFit’s MindFit/ Cog­niFit Per­sonal Coach, Lumos­ity, MyBrain­Trainer, Brain­Twister, Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Training.

7) The Lat­est in Men­tal Health: Work­ing Out at the ‘Brain Gym’ (Wall Street Journal)

- “Mar­shall Kahn, an 82-year-old fam­ily doc­tor in Fuller­ton, Calif., says he got such a boost from brain exer­cises he started doing at a “Nifty after Fifty” club that he decided to start see­ing patients again part-time. “Doing all the men­tal exer­cise,” he says, “I real­ized I’ve still got it.”

Debate Over Drugs For ADHD Reignites (Wash­ing­ton Post)

- “New data from a large fed­eral study have reignited a debate over the effec­tive­ness of long-term drug treat­ment of chil­dren with hyper­ac­tiv­ity or attention-deficit dis­or­der, and have drawn accu­sa­tions that some mem­bers of the research team have sought to play down evi­dence that med­ica­tions do lit­tle good beyond 24 months.”

- “The study also indi­cated that long-term use of the drugs can stunt children’s growth.”

Adap­tive train­ing leads to sus­tained enhance­ment of poor work­ing mem­ory in chil­dren (Devel­op­men­tal Science)

Abstract: Work­ing mem­ory plays a cru­cial role in sup­port­ing learn­ing, with poor progress in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics char­ac­ter­iz­ing chil­dren with low mem­ory skills. This study inves­ti­gated whether these prob­lems can be over­come by a train­ing pro­gram designed to boost work­ing mem­ory. Chil­dren with low work­ing mem­ory skills were assessed on mea­sures of work­ing mem­ory, IQ and aca­d­e­mic attain­ment before and after train­ing on either adap­tive or non-adaptive ver­sions of the pro­gram. Adap­tive train­ing that taxed work­ing mem­ory to its lim­its was asso­ci­ated with sub­stan­tial and sus­tained gains in work­ing mem­ory, with age-appropriate lev­els achieved by the major­ity of chil­dren. Math­e­mat­i­cal abil­ity also improved sig­nif­i­cantly 6 months fol­low­ing adap­tive train­ing. These find­ings indi­cate that com­mon impair­ments in work­ing mem­ory and asso­ci­ated learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties may be over­come with this behav­ioral treatment.

9) Brain cor­tex thin­ning linked to inher­ited depres­sion (Los Ange­les Times)

- “On aver­age, peo­ple with a fam­ily his­tory of depres­sion appear to have brains that are 28% thin­ner in the right cor­tex — the out­er­most layer of the brain — than those with no known fam­ily his­tory of the dis­ease. That cor­ti­cal thin­ning, said the researchers, is on a scale sim­i­lar to that seen in patients with Alzheimer’s dis­ease or schizophrenia.”

If you sub­scribe to our monthly newslet­ter, you may remem­ber we ran a sur­vey in Jan­u­ary. Well, the response rate and the qual­ity of the responses were noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar, in many dimen­sions. The responses from over 2,000 par­tic­i­pants (out of 21,000 sub­scribers) rein­force the need for pub­lic aware­ness ini­tia­tives and qual­ity infor­ma­tion to help eval­u­ate and nav­i­gate prod­uct claims.

I have been pre­sent­ing the results from one of the ques­tions (see below), yes­ter­day at the ASA/ NCOA (Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging) event, today at IHRSA (Inter­na­tional Health, Rac­quet and Sports­club Asso­ci­a­tion), as part of more com­pre­hen­sive pre­sen­ta­tions of what is going on in the brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive health field.

An obvi­ous impli­ca­tion for the sur­vey result rein­forces the need for brain-related pub­lic aware­ness cam­paigns such as the ongo­ing Brain Aware­ness Week. Every year, land­mark research find­ings open new oppor­tu­ni­ties to help main­tain life­long cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness. The oppor­tu­nity is immense — but we will need to ensure the mar­ket­place matures in a ratio­nal and sus­tain­able man­ner, help­ing con­sumers and pro­fes­sion­als sep­a­rate hope from hype and make informed decisions.

Robin Klaus, Chair­man of Club One Fit­ness Cen­ters (the com­pany is a client, he is an advi­sor), just gave us a nice quote say­ing that “as our pop­u­la­tion ages the fields of phys­i­cal fit­ness and brain fit­ness will nat­u­rally merge and, as this hap­pens, a whole new field of val­ued added ser­vices will emerge for our mem­bers. High qual­ity infor­ma­tional resources such as Sharp­Brains’ are cru­cial to the suc­cess of this merger.”

The Sur­vey: Results to Key Question

Asked, “What is the most impor­tant prob­lem you see in the brain fit­ness field and how do you think it can be solved?” respon­dents iden­ti­fied the fol­low­ing six prob­lems in rank order:

#1: Pub­lic Aware­ness (39%)
– “Get­ting peo­ple to under­stand that hered­ity alone does not decide brain func­tion­ing.“
– “An expec­tant pub­lic will first want to believe that a “mir­a­cle” drug is to be soon avail­able (to pre­vent Alzheimer’s Disease).”

#2: Nav­i­gat­ing Claims (21%)
- “How to sep­a­rate mar­ket­ing hype from stuff that really works?“
– “The lack of stan­dards and clear def­i­n­i­tions is very con­fus­ing, and makes a lot of peo­ple sceptical.”

#3: Research (15%)
– “Deter­min­ing what activ­i­ties are most ben­e­fi­cial to Read the rest of this entry »

In April 2008, Bay­crest, a lead­ing research insti­tute focused on aging and brain func­tion, received $10-million from the Ontario Gov­ern­ment to cre­ate a ground­break­ing Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness. Its stated goal was to “develop and com­mer­cial­ize a range of prod­ucts designed to improve the brain health of aging Ontar­i­ans and oth­ers around the world”.

“Our gov­ern­ment is proud to sup­port Bay­crest and its invalu­able work, which is already lead­ing to the dis­cov­ery of impor­tant new tools and approaches to treat­ing brain dis­eases asso­ci­ated with aging,” said Min­is­ter of Research and Inno­va­tion, John Wilkinson.

We have Baycrest’s CEO with us today, to explore why Ontario and Bay­crest chose to become pio­neers in this area, and dis­cuss some of the main oppor­tu­ni­ties, and chal­lenges. Dr. William E. Reich­man is Pres­i­dent and CEO of Bay­crest. Dr. Reich­man, an internationally-known expert in geri­atric men­tal health and demen­tia, is also Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try on the Fac­ulty of Med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Bill, thank you for your time. Let me start by ask­ing, given that you just spoke at the recent Con­sumer Elec­tronic Show, what do you make of the grow­ing brain fit­ness field?

Bill Reich­man: it looks like a clas­sic exam­ple of a very promis­ing but still early stage field – a lot of oppor­tu­nity and enthu­si­asm, but also a lot of prod­uct claims that are not backed by solid research. Think about the phys­i­cal fit­ness anal­ogy: even today, after decades of progress, you still see peo­ple buy­ing research-based prod­ucts such as tread­mills but also all types of ran­dom machines they see on TV and have not been sub­ject to any val­i­da­tion. Sim­i­larly, con­sumers today do not know what to make of grow­ing brain fit­ness claims. As another speaker pointed out, for the indus­try to ful­fill its promise, it will need to be care­ful with research and claims, not to end up like the nutraceu­ti­cals category.

By the way, let me rec­og­nize that the work you are doing with Sharp­Brains reports and your web­site is very impor­tant to offer qual­ity information.

Thank you. Let’s step back for a moment. Tak­ing a, say, 10 years view, what is the main oppor­tu­nity that technology-based brain fit­ness can offer to society?

First of all, let me say that I think we have an oppor­tu­nity to make major progress in Brain Health in the XXI cen­tury, sim­i­lar to what hap­pened with Car­dio­vas­cu­lar Health in the XX, and tech­nol­ogy will play a cru­cial role.

Given the rapid advances we are wit­ness­ing today in the research and tech­nol­ogy are­nas, I feel con­fi­dent in say­ing that in less than 10 years we will have both valid and reli­able assess­ments of cog­ni­tive func­tions, that will be used both by Read the rest of this entry »

Brain Fit­ness Com­ing to Senior Exer­cise Classes (press release):

- “The Amer­i­can Senior Fit­ness Asso­ci­a­tion (SFA) has announced a new brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram designed for exer­cise pro­fes­sion­als. Brain Fit­ness for Older Adults teaches senior fit­ness instruc­tors and per­sonal train­ers how to incor­po­rate effec­tive cog­ni­tive fit­ness into phys­i­cal activ­ity pro­grams, offer­ing seniors the oppor­tu­nity to boost both phys­i­cal and men­tal fit­ness simultaneously.”

Com­ment: a very timely ini­tia­tive, given the inter­est we see in brain fit­ness edu­ca­tion and ini­tia­tives, and the ben­e­fits of both phys­i­cal and men­tal exer­cise on brain health. It makes a lot of sense to enhance pub­lic aware­ness through train-the-trainer ini­tia­tives. What remains unclear in this SFA pro­gram is what is the direct evi­dence for some­thing that is billed as a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram” and seems to advo­cate one par­tic­u­lar set of exer­cises and move­ments for their train­ers and train­ers’ clients. It is one thing to claim a prod­uct pro­vides good infor­ma­tion & is edu­ca­tional (like a book, or this blog, or classes on the brain & brain health) and another one to claim that it is a “brain fit­ness train­ing pro­gram”, for which we should ask the same ques­tions we ask of any other inter­ven­tion to enhance cog­ni­tive func­tions, technology-based or not, fol­low­ing our 10-Question Pro­gram Eval­u­a­tion Check­list. What is the direct evi­dence that seniors trained by “senior fit­ness instruc­tors and per­sonal train­ers” using the method­ol­ogy that the SFA advo­cates will “boost both phys­i­cal and men­tal fit­ness simultaneously”?

10 Ques­tions to Choose the Right Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram — and a brief expla­na­tion of why each ques­tion is impor­tant: Read the rest of this entry »

In the post Top 10 Brain Train­ing Future Trends I asked for sug­ges­tions to refine our pre­dic­tions for the 2007–2015 period. A good num­ber of peo­ple con­tributed, and the win­ner is…

Scott Spears, retired pub­lic schools superintendent.

His prediction: 

“Pre­dic­tion 11: The notion of school­ing will be struc­turally dra­mat­i­cally altered through the use of diag­nos­tics related to the acqui­si­tion and improve­ment of basic cog­ni­tive skills (such as brain pro­cess­ing speed, atten­tion, mem­ory, and sequenc­ing), along with pre­scrip­tions employ­ing emerg­ing brain fit­ness soft­ware exer­cises, begin­ning in the ear­li­est grades and pro­gress­ing through high school.

Schools will be struc­tured around the acqui­si­tion of foun­da­tional cog­ni­tive skills, Read the rest of this entry »

What a beau­ti­ful dis­play of creativity:

Phys­i­cal Fit­ness ‘God­fa­ther’ Jack LaLanne Turns to Brain Fit­ness, Becom­ing Ambas­sador for Dakim’s [m] Power System

- Dakim, Inc., announced today that 93-year-young Jack LaLanne, the world’s most iconic fig­ure in health and fit­ness, has signed on as a “brain fit­ness moti­va­tional coach” on behalf of the company’s [m]Power Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Sys­tem, join­ing the company’s efforts to help seniors fight against dementia.

Read the rest of this entry »