Authors: Develop dig­i­tal games to improve brain func­tion and well-being (UW-Madison News):

“Neu­ro­sci­en­tists should help to develop com­pelling dig­i­tal games that boost brain func­tion and improve well-being, say two pro­fes­sors spe­cial­iz­ing in the field in a com­men­tary arti­cle pub­lished in the sci­ence jour­nal Nature. In the Feb. 28 issue, the two — Daphne Bave­lier of the Uni­ver­sity of Rochester and Richard J. David­son of the Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison — urge game design­ers and brain sci­en­tists to work together to design new games that train the brain, pro­duc­ing pos­i­tive effects on behav­ior, such as decreas­ing anx­i­ety, sharp­en­ing atten­tion and improv­ing empathy.”

To Learn More:

• National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion report: Can inter­ac­tive media boost atten­tion and well-being? (open access)
• Nature com­men­tary (requires subscription)
• Learn­ing with Video Games: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Edu­ca­tion and Training?

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on holis­tic brain health with clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist Dr. Paul Nuss­baum, author of Save Your Brain. You can learn more about the full Brain Fit­ness Q&A Series Here.

Per­haps one of the best exchanges was: Read the rest of this entry »

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

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 »

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

Wel­come to the 16th edi­tion  of Sci­en­tia Pro Pub­lica, the blog car­ni­val  that cel­e­brates the best sci­ence, nature and med­ical writ­ing pub­lished in the blo­gos­phere within the past 60 days.

What are some of the fas­ci­nat­ing top­ics you can explore and dis­cuss with this group of bloggers?

Sci­ence & Us

The Evolv­ing Mind: What’s the point of day­dream­ing?

Credit: Johan Stig­wall, via Flickr

Gen­er­ally Think­ing: What is the brain impact of dif­fer­ent types of med­i­ta­tion (focused, open mon­i­tor­ing, compassion)?

The Emo­tion Machine: Can blog­ging help you con­trol your envi­ron­ment and man­age stress?

Greater Good Mag­a­zine: Want to live longer and bett­ter?

Col­lec­tive Imag­i­na­tion: Can you share a pow­er­ful uncanny expe­ri­ence?

Sci­ence & Friends

via Live­Science

Lab Rat: Pros and Cons of hav­ing amphib­ian skin?

Sci­ence in Par­adise: Do sharks get can­cer?

Mauka to Makai: Can bun­nies offer new light on what comes after Via­gra, how to deal with nuclear feces, and new sources of electricity?

Kind of Curi­ous: Did dinousaurs migrate? dead or alive?

Migra­tions: Do beliefs on evo­lu­tion affect one’s abil­ity to appre­ci­ate bird­ing?

Sci­ence & Society

Sci­ence & Soul: Can we reverse corn mono­cul­ture trends?

Genomics Law Report: If a Direct-To-Consumer genomics com­pany goes bank­rupt, what hap­pens to your data? does HIPAA cover it?

And this con­cludes today’s edi­tion.  Kelsey will host next edi­tion (Decem­ber 7th) at Mauka to Makai;  you can sub­mit posts using this handy form. And if you’re inter­ested in host­ing Sci­en­tia at your blog, con­tact Grrlsci­en­tist!