Do you remem­ber the IMPACT study pub­lished in 2009? It was a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal trial with healthy older adults that com­pared a computer-based cog­ni­tive pro­gram that trains audi­tory pro­cess­ing (Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, Posit Sci­ence) with edu­ca­tional video pro­grams (con­trol group). Peo­ple who used the pro­gram improved in the trained tasks, which was not that sur­pris­ing, but there was also a clear ben­e­fit in audi­tory mem­ory, which wasn’t directly trained.

A 2011 paper reports the 3-month follow-up results of the IMPACT study. The 487 par­tic­i­pants in the orig­i­nal study were 65 and older. Train­ing was 1 hour a day, 4 to 5 days a week, for a total of 40 hours in 8 to 10 weeks. There was no con­tact with the researchers between the ini­tial train­ing study and the follow-up study.

The results showed that 3 months after the ini­tial train­ing most of the improve­ment observed in the train­ing group was still present, although not as strongly. Read the rest of this entry »

The grow­ing field of cog­ni­tive train­ing (one of the tools for brain fit­ness) can appear very con­fus­ing as the media keeps report­ing con­tra­dic­tory claims. These claims are often based on press releases, with­out a deeper eval­u­a­tion of the sci­en­tific evidence.

Let’s take a cou­ple of recent exam­ples, in suc­ces­sive days:

“It doesn’t work!” type of head­line:
Reuters (Feb. 10, 2009)  For­mal brain exer­cise won’t help healthy seniors: research“
Healthy older peo­ple shouldn’t bother spend­ing money on com­puter games and web­sites promis­ing to ward off men­tal decline, the author of a review of sci­en­tific evi­dence for the ben­e­fits of these “brain exer­cise” pro­grams says.

It works! type of head­line:
Sci­enceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009)  “Com­puter Exer­cises Improve Mem­ory And Atten­tion, Study Sug­gests“
Accord­ing to the researchers, par­tic­i­pants who used the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram also scored as well as those ten years younger, on aver­age, on mem­ory and atten­tion tests for which they did not train.

So, does struc­tured brain exer­cise / cog­ni­tive train­ing work or not?

The prob­lem may in fact reside in ask­ing this very ques­tion in the first place, as Alvaro pointed out a while ago in his arti­cle Alzheimer’s Dis­ease: too seri­ous to play with head­lines.

We need a more nuanced set of questions.

Why? Because:
1. Cog­ni­tion is made of sev­eral dif­fer­ent abil­i­ties (work­ing mem­ory, atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tions such as decision-making, etc)
2. Avail­able train­ing pro­grams do not all train the same abil­i­ties
3. Users of train­ing pro­grams do not all have the same needs or goals
4. We need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between enhanc­ing cog­ni­tive func­tions and delay­ing the onset of cog­ni­tive deficits such as Alzheimer’s.

Let’s illus­trate these points, by Read the rest of this entry »

The IMPACT study which we reported on in Decem­ber 2007, funded by Posit Sci­ence, con­ducted by the Mayo Clinic and USC Davis, has just announced pub­li­ca­tion at the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Geri­atrics Soci­ety. Ref­er­ence:

- Smith et al. A Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Pro­gram Designed Based on Prin­ci­ples of Brain Plas­tic­ity: Results from the Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Study. Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Geri­atrics Soci­ety, April 2009.

Com­puter Exer­cises Improve Mem­ory And Atten­tion, Study Sug­gests (Sci­ence Daily)

- “The Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing (IMPACT) study was funded by the Posit Sci­ence Cor­po­ra­tion, which owns the rights to the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, tested in the study.”

- “Of the 487 healthy adults over the age of 65 who par­tic­i­pated in a ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial, half used the Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for 40 hours over the course of eight weeks. The Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram con­sists of six audio exer­cises done on a com­puter, and is intended to “retrain the brain to dis­crim­i­nate fine dis­tinc­tions in sound, and do it in a way that keeps the user engaged,” Zelin­ski explained.” The other half of par­tic­i­pants spent an equal amount of time learn­ing from edu­ca­tional DVDs fol­lowed by quizzes.

Com­ment: this is a very inter­est­ing study, in that it shows both that cog­ni­tive train­ing works, and that it doesn’t work.

What do I mean? Read the rest of this entry »

Did you read about the recent exper­i­ment where young chimps dis­played amaz­ing visual work­ing mem­ory capa­bil­ity, beat­ing humans?

- You can watch a short video here.

- Lumos Labs has released a very fun game to test your own skills: try out this Chimp Game!

Also, some very good recent news articles:

1) Is it worth going to the mind gym? (New Sci­en­tist). This is one of the best arti­cles we have read in a while (unfor­tu­nately requires subscription).

- “Bird­watch­ing is the brain­child of San Francisco-based Lumos Labs, just one of the dozens of com­pa­nies that have sprung up in recent months to cash in on the “brain-training” craze. Like most of its com­peti­tors, the the­ory behind …”

Com­ments: the arti­cle intro­duces read­ers to much of the research and sci­en­tists we dis­cuss in our blog, such as Torkel Kling­berg’s work and recent results from the IMPACT study. The arti­cle would have been even bet­ter had Daniel Gopher been inter­viewed on his work improv­ing cog­ni­tive per­for­mance of mil­i­tary pilots and bas­ket­ball players.

2) Inno­va­tion: Your Brain Needs Just as Much Exer­cise as Your Body (Fox Busi­ness Network)

- “The mar­ket, how­ever, is still small. Accord­ing to Alvaro Fer­nan­dez , who co-founded mar­ket research and con­sult­ing firm Sharp­Brains, which is focused solely on the field of brain fit­ness, in 2007 the mar­ket was val­ued at $225 mil­lion, which is up from $150 mil­lion in 2005. Fer­nan­dez thinks there is poten­tial for it to surge, reach­ing more than $2 bil­lion by 2016.”

Com­ments:  Very good arti­cle. Those esti­mates refer to the whole brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket to assess and train cog­ni­tive skills, includ­ing Read the rest of this entry »

Newsweek’s Sharon Beg­ley writes a great note on Brain Train­ing: How It Works based on ini­tial data pre­sented at the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica over the week­end. Some quotes:

- With the nation’s 78 mil­lion baby boomers approach­ing the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys? moments, it’s no won­der the mar­ket for computer-based brain train­ing has shot up from essen­tially zero in 2005 to $80 mil­lion this year, accord­ing to the con­sult­ing firm SharpBrains.

- Now comes the largest and most rig­or­ous study of a commercially-available train­ing pro­gram, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morn­ing, at the meet­ing of the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica, sci­en­tists are pre­sent­ing data show­ing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour ses­sions with Brain Fit­ness 2.0 from Posit Sci­ence, elderly vol­un­teers got mea­sur­ably bet­ter in their brain’s speed and accu­racy of pro­cess­ing. And unlike every other train­ing pro­gram tested before, the improve­ments “gen­er­al­ize to broad mea­sures of cog­ni­tion and are notice­able in every­day life,” Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, who led the IMPACT (Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing) Study, reports.

- For the IMPACT study, 468 par­tic­i­pants, all healthy adults 65 and over, were divided into two groups. One received an hour a day of train­ing on Brain­Fit­ness for eight to ten weeks, and the other (the con­trol group) got the same amount of computer-based learn­ing. That choice of con­trol group is sig­nif­i­cant. It means that Brain Fit­ness was being com­pared not to star­ing into space or some sim­i­larly unhelp­ful activ­ity, but to one that might rea­son­ably be expected to improve men­tal ability.

- Because the Brain Fit­ness group showed greater improve­ments than the con­trols, includ­ing on tasks that the computer-based exer­cises did not explic­itly tar­get, it sug­gests that the audi­tory train­ing has altered some­thing fun­da­men­tal in the brain and not just spe­cific cir­cuits for, say, memory.

Read full post: Brain Train­ing: How It Works

The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica press release includes

- Researchers released ini­tial data today at the 60th Annual Meet­ing of The Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica (GSA) that showed that doing the right kind of brain exer­cise can enhance mem­ory and other cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties of older adults.

- “We pre­sented these impor­tant results at the Annual Meet­ing of GSA, because aging experts need to spread the word that cog­ni­tive decline is not an inevitable part of aging, said Dr. Zelin­ski. “Doing the prop­erly designed cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties can actu­ally enhance abil­i­ties as you age.”

I will be inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski as part of our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series, so keep tuned.

One clar­i­fi­ca­tion: this is not the first study to show how cog­ni­tive train­ing can gen­er­al­ize beyond the tasks directly trained. Oth­ers have already shown an effect on cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and even on real-world tasks, on a vari­ety of age groups and trained func­tions. But the size of it (468 par­tic­i­pants) makes it by far the largest that does so, and the effects are very sig­nif­i­cant and promising.

We hope you are enjoy­ing Brain Aware­ness Week this week and hope­fully think­ing a lit­tle more about your brain and brain fit­ness! Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago. You can sub­scribe to this monthly email update in the box on the the top of this page.

We have had another busy month behind us, and we’re look­ing for­ward to Brain Aware­ness Week March 12–18. Keep read­ing for the details (includ­ing a spe­cial offer in honor of Brain Aware­ness Week) …

I. Press Cov­er­age
II. Events
III. Pro­gram Reviews
IV. New Offer­ings
V. Web­site and Blog Sum­mary, includ­ing brain teasers
Read the rest of this entry »

Sev­eral recent sto­ries on brain train­ing and SharpBrains:

1) New brain games may improve mind fit­ness by Kevin Koster­man (U of Wis­con­sin Oshkosh’s Advance-Titan)

“Any­time we learn, we are train­ing, chang­ing, our brain,” Fer­nan­dez said. “The three key core ele­ments for effec­tive brain exer­cise are nov­elty, vari­ety and con­stant chal­lenge, sim­i­lar to increas­ing the level in machines we find in gyms.”

2) “Train­ing the Brain as pos­si­ble as Train­ing the Body”, جريدة النهار by Hanadi El Diri (Anna­har, one of the most pres­ti­gious papers in the Mid­dle East. The text is in Arabic.)

3) “Train your brain” by Mark Muck­en­fuss (The Press-Enterprise in River­side and San Bernardino)

“We can­not promise to peo­ple you will only keep get­ting bet­ter until you are 200 years old. But I think peo­ple still under­es­ti­mate how flex­i­ble the brain really is.”

The Smart­Brains [sic] pro­gram com­bines men­tal exer­cises with a stress reduc­tion pro­gram. Too much stress, says Fer­nan­dez, has been shown to be dam­ag­ing not only to per­for­mance, but to the brain itself.
With all of the avail­able pro­grams for stim­u­lat­ing the brain, he says, it is impor­tant to shop care­fully. A crit­i­cal ele­ment, he says, is how clients or par­tic­i­pants are evaluated.

“Make sure they have a cred­i­ble assess­ment that helps you find your strengths and weak­nesses and that they have pro­grams that address (those areas),” he says. “Assess­ments that give you 50 (as an age-equivalent grade) and a week later you’re 32, that’s not a valu­able assessment.”