Time for Sharp­Brains’ Sep­tem­ber 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing leading-edge research and insights to help con­nect the dots among tech­nol­ogy, healthy liv­ing, healthare, con­cus­sions, and–our protagonist–the brain.

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• Is the Inter­net mak­ing us dumber? (Nope, just different)
• Increas­ing cog­ni­tive loads on min­ers’ brains: good exam­ple of where soci­ety is heading
• Brain fit­ness meets HRV and EEG biometrics
• Employee Assis­tance Pro­grams enhance cor­po­rate well­ness with brain training
• The NIH Toolbox:First Com­pre­hen­sive & Stan­dard­ized Tests of Brain Function
• MMSE®/MMSE®-2™ Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment Screener, Now a Mobile App

Healthy Liv­ing & the Brain:

• Why do Super­Agers Main­tain Mem­ory and a Thick Cortex?
• Will Medicare’s Annual Well­ness Visit enhance phys­i­cal & cog­ni­tive health? Prob­a­bly — if peo­ple go
• Health value of Omega-3 sup­ple­ments is increas­ingly questioned
• Good Q&A on Mild Cog­ni­tive Impairment

Health­care & the Brain:

• Map­ping the Brain To Bet­ter Enhance and Treat the Mind
• Cog­ni­tive ther­apy or med­ica­tion? Brain scans may help per­son­al­ize treatments
• Mon­i­tor­ing EEG Brain Activ­ity to Per­son­al­ize Mem­ory Training
• Train­ing Atten­tion and Mem­ory after Bypass Surgery
• MRI scan tech­ni­cians can expe­ri­ence neg­a­tive neu­rocog­ni­tive effects

Con­cus­sions & the Brain:

• Retool­ing cog­ni­tive reha­bil­i­ta­tion for mil­i­tary patients with trau­matic brain injury
• NFL donates $30 mil­lion to improve con­cus­sion & brain injury care

Pic cour­tesy of Big­Stock­Photo

San­dia shows mon­i­tor­ing brain activ­ity dur­ing study can help pre­dict test per­for­mance (press release):

“The team mon­i­tored test sub­jects’ brain activ­ity while they stud­ied word lists, then used the EEG (elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy) to pre­dict who would remem­ber the most infor­ma­tion. Because Read the rest of this entry »

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion today on mem­ory, mem­ory tech­niques and brain-healthy lifestyles with Dr. Gary  Small, Direc­tor of UCLA’s Mem­ory Clinic and Cen­ter on Aging, and author of The Mem­ory Bible. You can learn more about his book  Here, and learn more about upcom­ing Brain Fit­ness Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Per­haps one of the best ques­tions and answers was:

2:55
Ques­tion: Gary, you’ve worked many years in this field. Let us in on the secret. What do YOU do you, per­son­ally, to pro­mote your own brain fit­ness?
2:57
Answer: I try to get at least 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic con­di­tion­ing each day; try to min­i­mize my stress by stay­ing con­nected with fam­ily and friends; gen­er­ally eat a brain healthy diet (fish, fruits, veg­eta­bles), and try to bal­ance my online time with my offline time. Which reminds me, I think it is almost time for me to sign off line. Read the rest of this entry »

How can we help younger gen­er­a­tions find the right path to life­long brain health and per­for­mance — espe­cially as they will live longer, and in more dynamic, com­plex envi­ron­ments? We cre­ated the Brain Health across the Lifes­pan series to curate reli­able sources of infor­ma­tion, and here you can  check out  the Top 10 Resources to Bet­ter Under­stand the Teenage Brain.

Wish­ing you and your fam­ily a very brain-fit decade…please enjoy the Decem­ber edi­tion of our monthly eNewslet­ter: Read the rest of this entry »

Numer­ous stud­ies show ben­e­fits of cog­ni­tive train­ing in older adults, despite a recent study ques­tion­ing their valid­ity. The debate on the effects of spe­cific cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions is not settled.

A find­ing that researchers do seem to agree on is that aging is accom­pa­nied by brain and cog­ni­tive decline. These reduc­tions seem to be mod­i­fi­able through cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal exer­cise. In this vein, our lab recently demon­strated that older adults involved in an 8-week mem­ory train­ing pro­gram show less brain atro­phy. This gives some hope for older adults won­der­ing whether their train­ing efforts are really worth­while. Read the rest of this entry »

Hav­ing a sense of con­trol over one’s life may be one of the most cru­cial mark­ers of suc­cess­ful aging. Aging indi­vid­u­als who feel in con­trol seem to know more about their health, be more likely to take actions to pro­tect it and thus enjoy health­ier and longer lives.

Stud­ies have shown that peo­ple feel less in con­trol as they get older. Could cog­ni­tive or brain train­ing boost such feel­ing and reverse or at least coun­ter­act that trend?

A recent study says the answer is yes. Read the rest of this entry »

Work­ing mem­ory (WM) is the cog­ni­tive sys­tem respon­si­ble for the tem­po­rary stor­age and manip­u­la­tion of infor­ma­tion and plays an impor­tant role in both learn­ing and focus­ing atten­tion. Con­sid­er­able research has doc­u­mented that many chil­dren and adults with ADHD have WM deficits and that this con­tributes to dif­fi­cul­ties asso­ci­ated with the dis­or­der. For an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the role of WM deficits in ADHD, click here.

A sim­ple exam­ple illus­trates the impor­tance of WM for par­tic­u­lar aca­d­e­mic tasks. Try adding 3 and 9 in your head. That was prob­a­bly easy for you. Now try­ing adding 33 and 99. That was prob­a­bly more dif­fi­cult. Finally, try adding 333 and 999. This is quite chal­leng­ing for most adults even though each cal­cu­la­tion required is triv­ially easy. The chal­lenge occurred because you need to store infor­ma­tion — the sum of 3+9 in the one’s col­umn and then ten’s col­umn — as you process the remain­ing part of the prob­lem, i.e., 3+9 in the hundred’s col­umn, and this taxed your WM. If your WM capac­ity was exceeded, you could not com­plete the prob­lem successfully.

This sim­ple prob­lem also illus­trates the dif­fer­ence between short-term mem­ory (STM) and WM. Short-term mem­ory sim­ply involves retain­ing infor­ma­tion in mind for short peri­ods of time, e.g., remem­ber­ing that the prob­lem you need to solve is 333+999. Work­ing mem­ory, in con­trast, involves men­tally manip­u­lat­ing — or ‘work­ing’ with — retained infor­ma­tion and comes into play in a wide range of learn­ing activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, to answer ques­tions about a sci­ence chap­ter, a child not only has to cor­rectly retain fac­tual infor­ma­tion but must men­tally work with that infor­ma­tion to answer ques­tions about it. Thus, when a child’s WM capac­ity is low rel­a­tive to peers, aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance is likely to be com­pro­mised in mul­ti­ple areas.

Because WM deficits play an impor­tant role in the strug­gles expe­ri­enced by many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, it is impor­tant to con­sider how dif­fer­ent inter­ven­tions address this aspect of the dis­or­der. In this study, the authors were inter­ested in com­par­ing the impact of Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing and stim­u­lant med­ica­tion treat­ment on the WM per­for­mance of chil­dren diag­nosed with ADHD.

Par­tic­i­pants were 25 8–11 year-old chil­dren with ADHD (21 boy and 4 girls) who were being treated with stim­u­lant med­ica­tion. Children’s mem­ory per­for­mance was assessed on 4 occa­sions using the Auto­mated Work­ing Mem­ory Assess­ment (AWMA), a com­put­er­ized test that mea­sures ver­bal short-term mem­ory, ver­bal work­ing mem­ory, visuo-spatial short-term mem­ory, and visuo-spatial work­ing memory.

At time 1, the assess­ment was con­ducted when chil­dren had been off med­ica­tion for at least 24 hours. The sec­ond assess­ment occurred an aver­age of 5 months later and when chil­dren were on med­ica­tion. The third assess­ment occurred after chil­dren had com­pleted 5 weeks of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing using the stan­dard train­ing pro­to­col (see below). The final assess­ment occurred approx­i­mately 6 months after train­ing had ended. This design enabled the researchers to make the fol­low­ing comparisons:

- WM per­for­mance on med­ica­tion vs. off med­ica­tion (T1 vs T2)
– WM per­for­mance on med­ica­tion vs. after train­ing (T2 vs. T3)
– WM per­for­mance imme­di­ately after train­ing ended vs. 6 months fol­low­ing train­ing (T3 vs. T4)

This final com­par­i­son pro­vided infor­ma­tion on whether any ben­e­fits pro­vided by the train­ing had endured.

In addi­tion to mea­sur­ing STM and WM at each time point, mea­sures of IQ were col­lected at times 1, 2, and 3.

- Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing -

WM train­ing was con­ducted using the stan­dard Cogmed train­ing pro­to­col with each child com­plet­ing 20–25 train­ing ses­sions within a 25 day period. The train­ing requires the stor­age and manip­u­la­tion of sequences of ver­bal, e.g., repeat­ing back a sequence of dig­its in reverse order, and/or visuo-spatial infor­ma­tion, e.g., recall­ing the loca­tion of objects on dif­fer­ent por­tions of the com­puter screen.

Dif­fi­culty level is cal­i­brated on a trial by trial basis so the child is always work­ing at a level that closely matches their per­for­mance. For exam­ple, if a child suc­cess­fully recalled three dig­its in reverse order, on the next trial he had to recall four. When a trial was failed, the next trial was made eas­ier by reduc­ing the num­ber of items to be recalled. This method of ‘adap­tive train­ing’ is thought to be a key ele­ment because it requires the child to ‘stretch’ their WM capac­ity to move through the program.

- Results -

- Impact of Short-Term Mem­ory and Work­ing Mem­ory -

Med­ica­tion vs. no med­ica­tion — When tested on med­ica­tion, Read the rest of this entry »