When you think of how the PC has altered the fab­ric of soci­ety, per­mit­ting instant access to infor­ma­tion and automat­ing processes beyond our wildest dreams, it is instruc­tive to con­sider that much of this progress was dri­ven by Moore’s law. Halv­ing the size of semi­con­duc­tor every 18 months catal­ysed an expo­nen­tial accel­er­a­tion in performance.

Why is this story rel­e­vant to mod­ern neu­ro­science and the work­ings of the brain? Because trans­for­ma­tive tech­no­log­i­cal progress arises out of choice and the actions of indi­vid­u­als who see poten­tial for change, and we may well be on the verge of such progress. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you read the cover story of the New Sci­en­tist this week: Men­tal mus­cle: six ways to boost your brain?

The arti­cle, which includes good infor­ma­tion on brain food, the value of med­i­ta­tion, etc., starts by say­ing that: “Brain train­ing doesn’t work, but there are lots of other ways to give your grey mat­ter a quick boost.” Fur­ther in the arti­cle you can read “… brain train­ing soft­ware has now been con­signed to the shelf of tech­nolo­gies that failed to live up to expectations.”

Such claims are based on the one study widely pub­li­cized ear­lier this year: the BBC “brain train­ing” exper­i­ment, pub­lished by Owen et al. (2010) in Nature.

What hap­pened to the sci­en­tific rigor asso­ci­ated with the New Scientist?

As expressed in one of our pre­vi­ous posts: “Once more, claims seem to go beyond the sci­ence back­ing them up … except that in this case it is the researchers, not the devel­op­ers, who are respon­si­ble.” (See BBC “Brain Train­ing” Exper­i­ment: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly).

Read our two pre­vi­ous posts to get to the heart of the BBC study and what it really means. As Alvaro Fer­nan­dez and Dr. Zelin­ski explore the poten­tial sci­en­tific flaws of the study, they both point out that there are very promis­ing pub­lished exam­ples of brain train­ing method­olo­gies that seem to work.

BBC “Brain Train­ing” Exper­i­ment: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Sci­en­tific cri­tique of BBC/ Nature Brain Train­ing Experiment

I was really inter­ested in the recent cri­tique of the BBC brain train­ing exper­i­ment by Dr. Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski. I think Owens et al (2010) was a crit­i­cal piece of research which was not con­ducted in the right way and was focus­ing on the wrong sam­ple pop­u­la­tion.  I totally agree with the com­ments by Dr. Zelin­ski regard­ing the poten­tial for sam­ple bias and the use of some ques­tion­able cog­ni­tive mea­sures. How­ever, I would like to take this cri­tique fur­ther and ques­tion whether the study was value for money when there are other stud­ies which can­not achieve fund­ing but would, in my opin­ion, show the criticism/scepticism of the use-it-or-lose-it theory.

I think there is not enough crit­i­cism about the age of the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion used in Owens et al. (2010). We have con­clu­sive cog­ni­tive and neu­ro­log­i­cal evi­dence that cognitive/neurological plas­tic­ity exists in young adults. There is also ade­quate evi­dence that neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is evi­dent in older adults. The crit­i­cal point which I want to make about the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion in Owens et al. study is that it did not tar­get the cor­rect sam­ple pop­u­la­tion, that is, older adults who are at risk of cognitive/neuronal atro­phy. It does not mat­ter if younger adults improve on brain train­ing tasks, or if skills picked up by younger adults from brain train­ing are not trans­ferred to other cog­ni­tive domains, sim­ply because younger adults are good at these skills/cognitive func­tions. There­fore there is a pos­si­bil­ity that ceil­ing or scal­ing effects mask the true find­ings in Owens et al. (2010), as indi­cated by Zelinski.

The recruit­ment of the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion is also very con­cern­ing and I do not feel that their con­trol group was appro­pri­ate. Read the rest of this entry »

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!

There has been quite a bit of com­ment about the Owen et al study in Nature avail­able online on April 20, 2010. A quick syn­op­sis of the study is that the BBC show Bang Goes the The­ory worked with the study authors to pro­vide a test of the hypoth­e­sis that com­mer­cially avail­able brain train­ing pro­grams trans­fer to gen­eral cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. The con­clu­sion was that, despite improve­ments on the trained tasks, “no evi­dence was found for trans­fer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cog­ni­tively closely related.”

The exper­i­ment

The study was con­ducted through the show’s web site. Of 52,617 par­tic­i­pants who reg­is­tered, approx­i­mately 20% (11,430) com­pleted full par­tic­i­pa­tion in the study, which con­sisted of two bench­mark­ing assess­ments 6 weeks apart with vari­ants of neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal tests and at least two train­ing ses­sions. Peo­ple were ran­domly assigned to one of three groups that were asked to train for about 10 min a day three times a week for the 6-week period, though they could train either more or less fre­quently. One of the two exper­i­men­tal groups was a “brain train­ing” group that com­pleted tasks includ­ing sim­ple arith­metic, find­ing miss­ing pieces, match­ing sym­bols to a tar­get, order­ing rotat­ing num­bers by numer­i­cal value, updat­ing, and mem­ory for items. Most of the train­ing ses­sions were 90 sec each; the rotat­ing num­bers tasks was 3 min. These activ­i­ties are sim­i­lar to those used in “edu­tain­ment” pro­grams that can be played online or with a hand­held device. The other exper­i­men­tal group was trained on rea­son­ing tasks that involved iden­ti­fy­ing rel­a­tive weights of objects based on a visual “see­saw”, select­ing the “odd” item in a con­cept for­ma­tion type task, a task involv­ing think­ing through the effects of one action on cur­rent and future states, and three plan­ning tasks includ­ing draw­ing a con­tin­u­ous line around a grid while ascer­tain­ing that the line will not hin­der later moves, a ver­sion of the Tower of Hanoi task, and a tile slid­ing game. The con­trol group spent time answer­ing ques­tions about obscure facts and orga­niz­ing them chrono­log­i­cally based on any avail­able online resource. Results indi­cated that the two exper­i­men­tal groups per­formed bet­ter than the con­trol group on only one out­come test of gram­mat­i­cal rea­son­ing; there were no dif­fer­ences between either exper­i­men­tal group and the con­trols on the remain­ing test. The exper­i­men­tal groups had improved on the trained tasks but not on the trans­fer tasks.

Sci­en­tific concerns

Although some news reports sug­gest that these find­ings are defin­i­tive, there are a num­ber of con­cerns, many of which have to do with whether the find­ings have been over­gen­er­al­ized to all forms of brain train­ing because only a few tests were used. Sec­ond, there have been ques­tions raised about the amount of time allo­cated to train­ing and the issue of test­ing in the home envi­ron­ment. The study reported Read the rest of this entry »

You may already have read the hun­dreds of media arti­cles today titled “brain train­ing doesn’t work” and sim­i­lar, based on the BBC “Brain Test Britain” experiment.

Once more, claims seem to go beyond the sci­ence back­ing them up … except that in this case it is the researchers, not the devel­op­ers, who are responsible.

Let’s recap what we learned today.

The Good Sci­ence

The study showed that putting together a vari­ety of brain games in one web­site and ask­ing peo­ple who hap­pen to show up to play around for a grand total of 3–4 hours over 6 weeks (10 min­utes 3 times a week for 6 weeks) didn’t result in mean­ing­ful improve­ments in cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing. This is use­ful infor­ma­tion for con­sumers to know, because in fact there are web­sites and com­pa­nies mak­ing claims based on sim­i­lar approaches with­out sup­port­ing evi­dence. And this is pre­cisely the rea­son Sharp­Brains exists, to help both con­sumers (through our book) and orga­ni­za­tions (through our report) to make informed deci­sions. The paper only included peo­ple under 60, which is sur­pris­ing, but, still, this is use­ful infor­ma­tion to know.

A TIME arti­cle sum­ma­rizes the lack of trans­fer well:

“But the improve­ment had noth­ing to do with the interim brain-training, says study co-author Jes­sica Grahn of the Cog­ni­tion and Brain Sci­ences Unit in Cam­bridge. Grahn says the results con­firm what she and other neu­ro­sci­en­tists have long sus­pected: peo­ple who prac­tice a cer­tain men­tal task — for instance, remem­ber­ing a series of num­bers in sequence, a pop­u­lar brain-teaser used by many video games — improve dra­mat­i­cally on that task, but the improve­ment does not carry over to cog­ni­tive func­tion in general.”

The Bad Sci­ence

The study, which was not a gold stan­dard clin­i­cal trial, con­tained obvi­ous flaws both in method­ol­ogy and in inter­pre­ta­tion, as some neu­ro­sci­en­tists have started to point out. Back to the TIME article:

“Kling­berg (note: Torkel Kling­berg is a cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist who has pub­lished mul­ti­ple sci­en­tific stud­ies on the ben­e­fits of brain train­ing, and founded a com­pany on the basis of that pub­lished work)…criticizes the design of the study and points to two fac­tors that may have skewed the results.

On aver­age the study vol­un­teers com­pleted 24 train­ing ses­sions, each about 10 min­utes long — for a total of three hours spent on dif­fer­ent tasks over six weeks. “The amount of train­ing was low,” says Kling­berg. “Ours and oth­ers’ research sug­gests that 8 to 12 hours of train­ing on one spe­cific test is needed to get a [gen­eral improve­ment in cognition].”

Sec­ond, Read the rest of this entry »

Update (04/20/10): after read­ing the full BBC study in Nature, I wrote the arti­cle titled BBC “Brain Train­ing” Exper­i­ment: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, say­ing that “you prob­a­bly saw the hun­dreds of media arti­cles titled “brain train­ing doesn’t work”, based on a BBC exper­i­ment. Once more, claims seem to go beyond the sci­ence back­ing them up … except that in this case it is the researchers, not the devel­op­ers, who are respon­si­ble.” You can keep read­ing full updated arti­cle Here.

Below is what I orig­i­nally wrote before the paper itself was available.

—

Tomor­row we’ll prob­a­bly wit­ness a lot of media cov­er­age about a exper­i­ment run by the BBC in the UK, to be pub­lished in Nature, on whether “brain train­ing” works.

The paper is still embar­goed, so we can­not com­ment on it, but what I can do is to share frag­ments of my email to a BBC reporter six months ago, dis­cussing impres­sions on what they had announced as the ulti­mate test of whether “brain train­ing” works.

Again, these were purely my impres­sions based on lim­ited pub­lic infor­ma­tion. Once we can com­ment on the pub­lished paper we’ll be able to pro­vide a more informed perspective.

“Hello XYZ,

Here go some of my thoughts based on my exter­nal per­cep­tion of your test:

• I agree with many of the premises for the test
• But “Does brain train­ing really work” is a highly mis­lead­ing frame: the obvi­ous answer is, yes, it works as a cat­e­gory. If not, do you mean peo­ple can’t learn? med­i­tate? go through cog­ni­tive ther­apy? cog­ni­tive retrain­ing? increase work­ing mem­ory and other brain func­tions? All these are estab­lished beyond doubt through dozens of well-controlled stud­ies where the inter­ven­tion effect a) goes beyond placebo, and b) remains there once train­ing is over. The 2009 report I sent you includes 10 Research Exec­u­tive Briefs by lead­ing sci­en­tists who ref­er­ence pub­lished papers in high-quality jour­nals. None eval­u­ates Nin­tendo — but should they be ignored, as a group?
• Now, the key ques­tions are, “what spe­cific brain train­ing are we talk­ing about”, “work for what?” and “work for whom?”. That’s where we could help edu­cate con­sumers sep­a­rate hope from hype.
• …Right now you are invent­ing your own “brain game”, and the only thing you will test is whether that spe­cific “brain game” you have develop “works” or not (not clear what out­come mea­sures you have). I wouldn’t dare to man­u­fac­ture my own car now from scratch and claim, based on the results, that “cars” work or don’t.
• I couldn’t agree more with “brain train­ing that is good for one per­son might not be good for you”, since one of “brain train­ing” prop­er­ties (both strength and weak­ness) is its highly tar­geted nature. The impli­ca­tion? we need bet­ter assess­ments to pin­point bot­tle­necks and direct appro­pri­ate inter­ven­tion. con­sumers need bet­ter edu­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion to know what is a waste of time and money and what may be wor­thy. Yet, your test seems to fully ignore this, and test whether the same thing is good for everyone…you may be throw­ing out the baby with the water…”

Your thoughts?

(Will link to paper once pub­lished). Related articles:

• Does Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Work? For whom? for what?
• Are videogames good for you? It depends on who YOU are