Just a quick note: next Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 27th, we’ll host the sec­ond and last webi­nar  to dis­cuss key mar­ket and com­pet­i­tive analy­ses based on “The Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020: Web-based, mobile and biometrics-based tech­nol­ogy to assess, mon­i­tor and enhance cog­ni­tion and brain func­tion­ing”, our new mar­ket report. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note: we’ll host a webi­nar this Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 6th, to dis­cuss key analy­ses and fore­casts based on “The Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020: Web-based, mobile and biometrics-based tech­nol­ogy to assess, mon­i­tor and enhance cog­ni­tion and brain func­tion­ing”, our new mar­ket report. Read the rest of this entry »

Who said, “So for me the most excit­ing take­away from this year’s CES (Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show)  isn’t the smart car or the smart home, it’s the smart per­son…” You can find the answer, and many insights on brain health inno­va­tion, by read­ing Sharp­Brains’ Jan­u­ary 2013 eNewslet­ter. Enjoy!

• Dig­i­tal health meets con­sumer elec­tron­ics and brain train­ing, by Dr. Evian Gor­don and Dr. Gre­gory Bayer
• Retool­ing Brain Care With Low-Cost, Data-Driven Tech­nolo­gies, by Alvaro Fernandez
• A con­ver­sa­tion on ‘The Opti­mism Bias’ with neu­ro­sci­en­tist Tali Sharot, by David Coleiro
• Why sci­en­tific lit­er­acy and learn­ing enhance brain func­tion and neural health, by Hemal Pathak, PhD
• Best brain health fit­ness tip? “Never let sta­tus quo be an option”, with Dr. San­dra Chapman
• 10 pre­dic­tions on how dig­i­tal plat­forms will trans­form brain health in 2013, by Alvaro Fernandez
• Why, to improve mem­ory, we need to think of the brain as a sys­tem, with Alvaro Fernandez
• Quick poll: 71% would take an “annual men­tal check-up”

Note: We’ll host a 90– minute webi­nar on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 6th, to dis­cuss the main analy­sis and fore­casts from Sharp­Brains’ new mar­ket report “The Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020: Web-based, mobile and biometrics-based tech­nol­ogy to assess, mon­i­tor and enhance cog­ni­tion and brain func­tion­ing,” and to con­nect them with main take aways from CES 2013 and the just fin­ished World Eco­nomic Forum.

–> To learn how to access the webi­nar and the report,  click HERE

We will dis­cuss the main find­ings and inno­va­tion opportunities/ chal­lenges iden­ti­fied in Sharp­Brains’ new mar­ket report The Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020: Web-based, mobile and biometrics-based tech­nol­ogy to assess, mon­i­tor and enhance cog­ni­tion and brain func­tion­ing.

When: Wednes­day, Jan­u­ary 30th, 2013, 1–2.30pm US East­ern Time (live webi­nar will be recorded for later view­ing by reg­is­trants) Read the rest of this entry »

We are proud to release today what we believe is our best mar­ket intel­li­gence report so far, track­ing how fully auto­mated appli­ca­tions designed to assess, mon­i­tor and/ or enhance cog­ni­tion and brain func­tion­ing are trans­form­ing brain health, and health overall.

Here are a few exam­ples of what we mean by Dig­i­tal Brain Health, selected from among the 5 Mar­ket Lead­ers and 10 Com­pa­nies to Watch in 2013/2014 iden­ti­fied through our com­pre­hen­sive analysis.

• A 30-minute online brain health assess­ment and per­son­al­ized brain fit­ness pro­gram used by large com­pa­nies like Nation­wide Insur­ance and Accen­ture to improve employee’s pro­duc­tiv­ity and men­tal wellness
• An online cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram offered by sev­eral large AAA chap­ters to mem­bers age 50+ to improve dri­ving safety
• A com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy offered by the NHS in the UK as a first-line inter­ven­tion for anx­i­ety and depression
• A fully dig­i­tal head­set and plat­form that mea­sures basic brain states (such as level of atten­tion) and is being used to help peo­ple med­i­tate bet­ter and reduce ADHD symptoms
• An iPad-based assess­ment that tracks cog­ni­tive per­for­mance over time to help detect con­cus­sions among football/ hockey play­ers and mil­i­tary per­son­nel Read the rest of this entry »

New study shows Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion improves brain func­tion­ing in ADHD stu­dents (press release):

- “Prior research shows ADHD chil­dren have slower brain devel­op­ment and a reduced abil­ity to cope with stress,” said Dr. Stixrud. “Vir­tu­ally every­one finds it dif­fi­cult to pay atten­tion, orga­nize them­selves and get things done when they’re under stress,” he explained. “Stress inter­feres with Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Michael Merzenich, Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor at UCSF, is a lead­ing pio­neer in brain plas­tic­ity research. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant. In 1996, he was the found­ing CEO of Sci­en­tific Learn­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (Nas­daq: SCIL), and in 2004 became co-founder and Chief Sci­en­tific Offi­cer of Posit Sci­ence. He was elected to the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences in 1999 and to the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine this year. He retired as Fran­cis A. Sooy Pro­fes­sor and Co-Director of the Keck Cen­ter for Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Fran­cisco in 2007. You may have learned about his work in one of PBS TV spe­cials, mul­ti­ple media appear­ances, or neuroplasticity-related books.

(Alvaro Fer­nan­dez) Dear Michael, thank you very much for agree­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the inau­gural Sharp­Brains Sum­mit in Jan­u­ary, and for your time today. In order to con­tex­tu­al­ize the Summit’s main themes, I would like to focus this inter­view on the likely big-picture impli­ca­tions dur­ing the next 5 years of your work and that of other neu­ro­plas­tic­ity research and indus­try pioneers.

Thank you for invit­ing me. I believe the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit will be very use­ful and stim­u­lat­ing, you are gath­er­ing an impres­sive group together. I am look­ing for­ward to January.

Neuroplasticity-based Tools: The New Health & Well­ness Frontier

There are many dif­fer­ent technology-free approaches to har­ness­ing –enabling, dri­ving– neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. What is the unique value that tech­nol­ogy brings to the cog­ni­tive health table?

It’s all about effi­ciency, scal­a­bil­ity, per­son­al­iza­tion, and assured effec­tive­ness. Tech­nol­ogy sup­ports the imple­men­ta­tion of near-optimally-efficient brain-training strate­gies. Through the Inter­net, it enables the low-cost dis­tri­b­u­tion of these new tools, any­where out in the world. Tech­nol­ogy also enables the per­son­al­iza­tion of brain health train­ing, by pro­vid­ing sim­ple ways to mea­sure and address indi­vid­ual needs in each person’s brain-health train­ing expe­ri­ence. It enables assess­ments of your abil­i­ties that can affirm that your own brain health issues have been effec­tively addressed.

Of course sub­stan­tial gains could also be achieved by orga­niz­ing your every­day activ­i­ties that grow your neu­ro­log­i­cal abil­i­ties and sus­tain your brain health. Still, if the ordi­nary cit­i­zen is to have any real chance of main­tain­ing their brain fit­ness, they’re going to have to spend con­sid­er­able time at the brain gym!

One espe­cially impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion of tech­nol­ogy is the scal­a­bil­ity that it pro­vides for deliv­er­ing brain fit­ness help out into the world. Think about how effi­cient the drug deliv­ery sys­tem is today. Doc­tors pre­scribe drugs, insur­ance cov­ers them, and there is a drug store in every neigh­bor­hood in almost every city in the world so that every patient has access to them. Once neuroplasticity-based tools and out­comes and stan­dard­ized, we can envi­sion a sim­i­lar sce­nario. And we don’t need all those drug stores, because we have the Internet!

Hav­ing said this, there are obvi­ous obsta­cles. One main one, in my mind, is the lack of under­stand­ing of what these new tools can do. Cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams, for exam­ple, seem counter-intuitive to con­sumers and many pro­fes­sion­als “ why would one try to improve speed-of-processing if all one cares about is œmem­ory? A sec­ond obvi­ous prob­lem is to get indi­vid­u­als to buy into the effort required to really change their brains for the bet­ter. That buy-in has been achieved for many indi­vid­u­als as it applies to their phys­i­cal health, but we haven’t got­ten that far yet in edu­cat­ing the aver­age older per­son that brain fit­ness train­ing is an equally effort­ful business!

Tools for Safer Dri­ving: Teens and Adults

Safe dri­ving seems to be one area where the ben­e­fits are more intu­itive, which may explain the sig­nif­i­cant traction.

Yes, we see great poten­tial and inter­est among insur­ers for improv­ing dri­ving safety, both for seniors and teens. Appro­pri­ate cog­ni­tive train­ing can lower at-fault acci­dent rates. You can mea­sure clear ben­e­fits in rel­a­tively short time frames, so it won’t take long for insur­ers to see an eco­nomic ratio­nale to not only offer pro­grams at low cost or for free but to incen­tivize dri­vers to com­plete them. All­state, AAA, State Farm and other insur­ers are begin­ning to real­ize this poten­tial. It is impor­tant to note that typ­i­cal acci­dents among teens and seniors are dif­fer­ent, so that train­ing method­olo­gies will need to be dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent high-risk populations.

Yet, most dri­ving safety ini­tia­tives today still focus on edu­cat­ing dri­vers, rather that train­ing them neu­ro­log­i­cally. We mea­sure vision, for exam­ple, but com­pletely ignore atten­tional con­trol abil­i­ties, or a driver’s use­ful field of view. I expect this to change sig­nif­i­cantly over the next few years.

Long-term care and health insur­ance com­pa­nies will ulti­mately see sim­i­lar ben­e­fits, and we believe that they will fol­low a sim­i­lar course of action to reduce gen­eral med­ical and neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease– (Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment and Alzheimer’s– and Parkinsons-) related costs. In fact, many senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties are among the pio­neers in this field.

Boomers & Beyond: Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Vitality

Main­stream media is cov­er­ing this emerg­ing cat­e­gory with thou­sands of sto­ries. But most cov­er­age seems still focused on does it work? more than “how do we define It”, what does work mean? or work for whom, and for what? Can you sum­ma­rize what recent research suggests?

We have seen clear pat­terns in the appli­ca­tion of our train­ing pro­grams, some pub­lished (like IMPACT), some unpub­lished, some with healthy adults, and some with peo­ple with mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment or early Alzheimers Dis­ease (AD). What we see in every case: Read the rest of this entry »