Brain Fitness News: Posit Science, Slate

A cou­ple of quick links

• DISCOVER Mag­a­zine, May 2007 issue, brings a great arti­cle titled “The Elas­tic Brain: Michael Merzenich believes you can tone your mind and stave off mem­o­ry loss. All it takes is time in his men­tal gym”. The arti­cle (which is not avail­able online) pro­vides a great overview of the amaz­ing work of Prof. Merzenich (a UCSF neu­ro­sci­en­tist) with Sci­en­tif­ic Learn­ing and Posit Sci­ence, pio­neers in the field. The writer’s tone is pos­i­tive over­all but adds a note of skep­ti­cism, say­ing that “Yet despite the enthu­si­as­tic tes­ti­mo­ny I heard from senior cit­i­zens who have tried the pro­gram, there are no for­mal stud­ies pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals that demon­strate the pro­gram’s effects” and gath­er­ing crit­i­cisms out­lined by oth­er researchers. Hav­ing said so, in our opin­ion, Posit Sci­ence offers the best pro­gram we have seen focused on improv­ing audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing, and we expect to see more clear stud­ies soon-the field is rel­a­tive­ly new.
• Slate Mag­a­zine presents a spe­cial issue on the brain. We will review and com­ment on it soon, includ­ing a neu­ro­bic club/ brain gym.

You can see here an inter­view with inter­view with Dr. Michael Merzenich