Is ADHD over­diag­nosed? Despite wide­spread con­cerns that this occurs, a study that specif­i­cally addresses this issue has not been con­ducted in the US. Thus, although it is well estab­lished that many chil­dren with ADHD are never iden­ti­fied or treated, the extent to which chil­dren are incor­rectly diag­nosed with ADHD is not known. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have  noticed that Amazon.com is shar­ing aggre­gated data on how ebook read­ers inter­act with the books they are read­ing. For exam­ple, the “Pop­u­lar High­lights” sec­tion (towards the bot­tom of our Kin­dle book page) ranks the Top 10 sen­tences that Kin­dle read­ers have high­lighted and shared while read­ing The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice and Prod­uct Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp (April 2009; 182 pages; ranked #1 in Kin­dle Store’s Pre­ven­tive Med­i­cine section).

This infor­ma­tion is invalu­able to authors and pub­lish­ers - as you can imag­ine, we’ll make sure to not only main­tain but to elab­o­rate on these top­ics as we pre­pare future edi­tions of the book.

So, what are so far the Top Ten Quotes on Life­long Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and Neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­feed­back — also known as EEG Biofeed­back — is an approach for treat­ing ADHD in which indi­vid­u­als are pro­vided real-time feed­back on their brain­wave pat­terns and taught to pro­duce and main­tain pat­terns con­sis­tent with a focused, atten­tive state. This is often done by col­lect­ing brain­wave, i.e., EEG, data from indi­vid­u­als as they focus on stim­uli pre­sented on a com­puter screen. Their abil­ity to con­trol the stim­uli, for exam­ple, keep­ing the ‘smile on a smi­ley face’, is con­tin­gent on main­tain­ing the brain­wave pat­tern being trained.

Neu­ro­feed­back sup­port­ers believe that learn­ing this dur­ing train­ing gen­er­al­izes to real world sit­u­a­tions and results in improved atten­tion and reduced hyperactive/impulsive behav­ior. Although a num­ber of neu­ro­feed­back stud­ies have yielded promis­ing results it remains some­what con­tro­ver­sial with some researchers argu­ing that lim­i­ta­tions of these stud­ies pre­clude firm con­clu­sions about the effec­tive­ness of neu­ro­feed­back from being drawn.

Last year I reviewed a par­tic­u­larly well-conducted study of neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment for ADHD — see my review here. The study was con­ducted in Ger­many and began with 94 chil­dren aged 8 to 12. All had been care­fully diag­nosed with ADHD and over 90% had never received med­ica­tion treat­ment. About 80% were boys.

Chil­dren were ran­domly assigned to receive either 36 ses­sions of neu­ro­feed­back train­ing or 36 ses­sions of com­put­er­ized atten­tion train­ing. The com­put­er­ized atten­tion train­ing task was intended to serve as the con­trol inter­ven­tion and pro­vided equal amounts of time work­ing on a demand­ing cog­ni­tive task under the super­vi­sion of an adult; the inclu­sion of this con­trol con­di­tion is a real strength of the study.

The main find­ings were as fol­lows: Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, Rajen­dra, an Indian reader of our newslet­ter, told us that ASHA (the acronym for the Amer­i­can Seniors Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion, for whom we pre­pared this spe­cial report), means Hope in Hindi.

Asha, every­one!

Then, we saw a few excel­lent arti­cles on Brain Fit­ness and Sharp­Brains in mul­ti­ple lan­guages and continents-time to prac­tice our lan­guage skills!:

Train your brain (Finan­cial Times Germany):

“Ob Gehirn­train­ing etwas ntzt ist nicht bewiesen. Aber in den USA boomt der Markt, Her­steller kooperieren mit Krankenkassen und Senioren­heimen. In Deutsch­land fassen die Spiele ger­ade erst Fu.”

Toman auge ejer­ci­cios que adies­tran la mente (Mile­nio, Mexico):

“La clave est¡ en encon­trar activi­dades que estim­ulen m¡s nues­tra memoria.”

Trois nou­velles tudes IDATE : Seri­ous Games (Publi-News, France):

“A tra­vers une analyse dtaille des car­ac­tris­tiques, des usages et des diffrentes familles de seri­ous games, cette tude met en vidence les enjeux asso­cis aux phases de con­cep­tion, de devel­oppe­ment et de dif­fu­sion des diffrents types de seri­ous games.”

English-speakers were rep­re­sented too:
An idea whose time has (finally) come (McKnight’s Long Term Care News):

“Like many rev­o­lu­tions, long-term care’s recent embrace of technology-based brain fit­ness tools began qui­etly. Then it exploded.”