Beating forgetfulness and boosting the brain

Very good arti­cle in Mar­ket­Watch titled Beat­ing for­get­ful­ness and boost­ing the brain. Prob­a­bly the best we have seen so far pro­vid­ing an over­all indus­try per­spec­tive on a nascent field. I rec­om­mend read­ing the whole arti­cle, but here you have some teasers:

• “As boomers age, the dri­ve to cor­rect such dis­com­fort has impli­ca­tions for health and well­ness, employ­ment and cor­po­rate train­ing — even sports. It’s giv­ing rise to a bur­geon­ing busi­ness of brain-boost­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices, as well as explo­ration into “cog­ni­tive enhanc­ing” pre­scrip­tion drugs.”
• “The mar­ket for brain-fit­ness soft­ware tar­get­ing U.S. adults is esti­mat­ed to be $80 mil­lion to $100 mil­lion this year, up from $60 mil­lion last year and $2 mil­lion in 2005, accord­ing to Sharp­Brains, a San Fran­cis­co-based por­tal that helps indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies nav­i­gate brain-train­ing infor­ma­tion, prod­ucts and services.”
• “It’s also easy to con­fuse age-relat­ed mem­o­ry prob­lems with the effects of undi­ag­nosed depres­sion or anx­i­ety, which are reversible, said Dr. Gene Cohen, direc­tor of the Cen­ter on Aging, Health & Human­i­ties at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Center”
• “The busi­ness of brain train­ing start­ed tak­ing off after Nin­ten­do intro­duced its Brain Age to the U.S. mar­ket last year, said Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, chief exec­u­tive and co-founder of SharpBrains.”
• “Brain fit­ness, in our view, is a lot broad­er than just healthy aging,” Fer­nan­dez said. The same con­cepts can be used to help kids with atten­tion deficit dis­or­ders or peo­ple who want to improve their periph­er­al vision for the bas­ket­ball court, he said. It also can help pro­fes­sion­als man­age stress.
• “Most peo­ple don’t under­stand the rela­tion­ship between stress and short-term mem­o­ry,” he said, not­ing that the part of the brain that deals with anger and stress can over­whelm the part respon­si­ble for rea­son­ing and deci­sion-mak­ing. “For some peo­ple that’s the bottleneck.”
• The good news is it’s nev­er too late, Cohen said. “ ‘Use it or lose it’ has no end point in the life cycle.”

You can read the full arti­cle on VITAL SIGNS Beat­ing for­get­ful­ness and boost­ing the brain.

If you want a sci­en­tif­ic per­spec­tive on what the arti­cle dis­cuss­es, you’ll enjoy our recent interviews

• Yaakov Stern on Build­ing Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve
• Mem­o­ry train­ing and atten­tion deficits: inter­view with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gibson
• Cog­ni­tive Sim­u­la­tions for Bas­ket­ball Game-Intel­li­gence: Inter­view with Prof. Daniel Gopher
• Enhanc­ing Trad­er Per­for­mance: Inter­view with Brett N. Steenbarger
• Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Cog­ni­tive Training