Exercise your brain in the Cognitive Age

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In the past two days, The New York Times has pub­lished two excel­lent arti­cles on brain and cog­ni­tive fit­ness. Despite appear­ing in sep­a­rate sec­tions (tech­nol­o­gy and editorial), the two have more in com­mon than imme­di­ate­ly meets the eye. Both raise key ques­tions that politi­cians, health pol­i­cy mak­ers, busi­ness leaders, educators and consumers should pay atten­tion to.

1) First, Exer­cise Your Brain, or Else You’ll … Uh …, by Katie Hafn­er (5/3/08). Some quotes:

- “At the same time, boomers are seiz­ing on a mount­ing body of evi­dence that sug­gests that brains con­tain more plas­tic­i­ty than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, and many peo­ple are tak­ing mat­ters into their own hands, doing brain fit­ness exer­cis­es with the same inten­si­ty with which they attack a treadmill.”

- “Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, whose brain fit­ness and con­sult­ing com­pa­ny, Sharp­Brains, has a Web site focused on brain fit­ness research. He esti­mates that in 2007 the mar­ket in the Unit­ed States for so-called neu­rosoft­ware was $225 million.”

- “Mr. Fer­nan­dez point­ed out that com­pared with, say, the phys­i­cal fit­ness indus­try, which brings in $16 bil­lion a year in health club mem­ber­ships alone, the brain fit­ness soft­ware indus­try is still in its infan­cy. Yet it is grow­ing at a 50 per­cent annu­al rate, he said, and he expects it to reach $2 bil­lion by 2015.”

- “Boomers believe they have ample rea­son to wor­ry. There is no defin­i­tive lab­o­ra­to­ry test to detect Alzheimer’s disease”. 

- “Smart peo­ple find new ways to exer­cise their brains that don’t involve buy­ing soft­ware or tak­ing expen­sive work­shops,” he (Note: mag­a­zine pub­lish­er David Bun­nell) said.

Arti­cle: Exer­cise Your Brain, or Else You’ll … Uh …

Com­ments:  I enjoyed the con­ver­sa­tions I had with the NYT reporter, Katie Hafn­er. The main 3 points I want­ed to con­vey were, and are:

a) The brain fit­ness soft­ware pro­grams men­tioned in the arti­cle (and others) are no more than “tools“ to exer­cise cer­tain brain functions. None of the products on the mar­ket today offer an over­all brain health solu­tion. Some pro­grams are help­ful at train­ing spe­cif­ic cog­ni­tive skills that tend to decline with age, others improve atten­tion or deci­sion mak­ing skills, and still others help assess cog­ni­tive func­tions. If health, edu­ca­tion and cor­po­rate executives as well as consumers become more famil­iar with the progress that cog­ni­tive sci­ence has made over the last 10–20 years, they will be able to make informed deci­sions about which, if any, tools, may help. This is what “smart peo­ple” do: adapt to new envi­ron­ments and use new tools appro­pri­ate­ly ‑ with­out falling prey either to man­u­fac­tur­ers’ inflated/ con­fus­ing claims, or negat­ing the val­ue of those tools as a gen­er­al principle.

b) Many times, baby boomers wor­ried about their mem­o­ry tend to blame Alzheimer’s dis­ease. This reac­tion caus­es stress and anx­i­ety, which in turn harms the brain struc­tural­ly (by reducing neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis ‑ the cre­ation of new neu­rons) and func­tion­al­ly (by reducing work­ing mem­o­ry and deci­sion-mak­ing abilities). Hence, stress man­age­ment or emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­tion, is often a much need­ed cog­ni­tive train­ing intervention.
    
c) The brain fit­ness market is grow­ing fast and this trend will con­tin­ue. This is not just a Nin­ten­do-fueled fad. The arti­cle reflects this point best. Part of the mar­ket con­fu­sion lies in the dis­con­nect between what com­put­er­ized brain fit­ness pro­grams can do (the ones with more sci­ence behind them than Nin­ten­do Brain Age) and what peo­ple seem to want them to do. Com­put­er­ized pro­grams can be an effi­cient way to exer­cise and train spe­cif­ic cog­ni­tive skills and improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and dai­ly life. Think of them as sim­i­lar to the range of equip­ment in a health club. If you walk into a health club today, you will find machines for abdom­i­nal mus­cles and others for car­dio training, biceps, etc. Sim­i­lar­ly, there are brain fit­ness programs to improve audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing, oth­ers to expand work­ing memory, main­tain dri­ving-relat­ed skills, etc.
    
How­ev­er, what the cur­rent brain fit­ness soft­ware programs can’t do is to pre­vent Alzheimer’s dis­ease alto­geth­er. At most, there is cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that they can (togeth­er with, say, learn­ing how to play the piano, tak­ing on a sec­ond or third career, or nur­tur­ing new stim­u­lat­ing inter­ests) help low­er the prob­a­bil­i­ty of devel­op­ing Alzheimer’s symp­toms. But, again, no spe­cif­ic program has been shown to be bet­ter than anoth­er from this “anti-Alzheimer’s” point of view. The best pro­tec­tion is to lead rich, stim­u­lat­ing lives.
    
The second excel­lent arti­cle in the New York Times on a relat­ed top­ic was an opin­ion piece by David Brooks, which pro­vides the per­fect con­text for why cog­ni­tive fit­ness and train­ing deserves more atten­tion than it gets today.
    
2) David Brooks: The Cog­ni­tive Age (5/2/08). Quotes: 

-“It’s the skills rev­o­lu­tion. We’re mov­ing into a more demand­ing cog­ni­tive age. In order to thrive, peo­ple are com­pelled to become bet­ter at absorb­ing, pro­cess­ing and com­bin­ing information.”

-“the most impor­tant part of information’s jour­ney is the last few inch­es — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the var­i­ous regions of the brain. Does the indi­vid­ual have the capac­i­ty to under­stand the infor­ma­tion? Does he or she have the train­ing to exploit it?”

-“But the cog­ni­tive age par­a­digm empha­sizes psy­chol­o­gy, cul­ture and ped­a­gogy — the spe­cif­ic process­es that fos­ter learning.”

Arti­cle: David Brooks: The Cog­ni­tive Age

Com­ments: Beau­ti­ful­ly said. Yes, we are “mov­ing into a more demand­ing cog­ni­tive age.” This is true for the rea­sons that Brooks aludes to: because of globalization that requires work­ers to keep their cog­ni­tive skills sharp to com­pete. But, there are oth­er rea­sons such as current demo­graph­ic, health and sci­en­tif­ic trends. Peo­ple are liv­ing longer which means that they have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to expe­ri­ence cog­ni­tive decline and and will require spe­cif­ic interventions. Huge med­ical advances over the last 100 years have enabled longevity, improved qual­i­ty of life over­all. But, they have focused more on how to main­tain “healthy bodies“ than on “healthy brains.“ Thanks to sci­en­tif­ic research, there is now more knowl­edge on the cog­ni­tive effects of a vari­ety of med­ica­tions  and con­di­tions, from atten­tion deficit disorders to chemother­a­py and beyond. Our mar­ket pro­jec­tions take into account these trends. 
    
In sum, we agree with Brooks: the Cog­ni­tive Age is here. And we add: new tools will help us be more healthy and pro­duc­tive, as we cov­er in our Mar­ket Report.
    
PS: I have cho­sen to ignore Mr. Brooks last sen­tence, since I fail to see the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his innu­en­do against Democ­rats. If any­thing, we’d need to com­pare respec­tive plat­forms on Iraq & military bud­get, health­care, edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, not just trade.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. D Parker says

    RE: Brooks’ last sen­tence. You must not live in one of the states “hit hard by NAFTA.”

    Watch the tape of Clin­ton and Oba­ma say­ing one thing about NAFTA to Ohioans and the oppo­site hours lat­er to Tex­ans. They rec­og­nize the NAFTA is geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­crim­i­nat­ing, but they still blame the com­pa­nies and the countries.

    In the next months, lis­ten to the empha­sis on what was done “to us” by those com­pa­nies that left for oth­er (Asian and Lati­no) coun­tries. It isn’t that our col­leges aren’t pro­duc­ing work­ers who can han­dle the cog­ni­tive demands of the Cog­ni­tive Age / New Econ­o­my. FYI: I am a uni­ver­si­ty instruc­tor and a Demo­c­rat from Ohio.

    And there is no “innu­en­do” in the sen­tence you object to — it is a fair­ly clear claim that the Democ­rats blame coun­tries. My argu­ment would be that all the nation­al pols who know where we are at elec­tion time make the same pitch­es. And none of them are around to increase fund­ing for K‑16 edu­ca­tion — only high-risk testing.

  2. Alvaro says

    Thank you for rais­ing some good points. Cer­tain­ly, there is much to object to in Democ­rats’ trade platforms.

    Now, my point is that Brooks’ attack on Democ­rats sim­ply dis­tracts, more than help­ing under­stand and deal with the situation.

    It does­n’t fol­low from the rest of the arti­cle. And it does­n’t build on sol­id, com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis. It comes accross pret­ty ran­dom, per­haps reveal­ing more about his polit­i­cal lean­ings than his superb cog­ni­tive skills.

    The pub­lic pol­i­cy and polit­i­cal debate that should fol­low the claim that we live in a Cog­ni­tive Age should be cen­tered on what spe­cif­ic struc­tur­al poli­cies can­di­dates are advo­cat­ing, to pre­pare our pop­u­la­tion for that new envi­ron­ment: Iraq & mil­i­tary bud­get, health­care, edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, not just trade.

    For exam­ple, one could claim that the Repub­li­can Bush admin­is­tra­tion has been the most anti-sci­ence in recent his­to­ry, help­ing move the US back­wards in this Cog­ni­tive Age, and that Repub­li­can lead­ers, includ­ing their can­di­date, don’t seem to have reneged on that, hence. Is this more or less rel­e­vant than trade policies?

  3. Jan_Naxon says

    Inter­est­ing dia­logue about pol­i­tics and cognition..it was a good brain exer­cise just to read and comprehend!

  6. Nicholas Alexander G.P. says

    Hel­lo everyone!
    I just want to state that our goal is to improve our­selves and if on the way we can make the ones we care about hap­py than we will be in paradise.
    Nev­er­the­less no mat­ter what we are or what we turn out to be as long as are self­aware we have the right to choose.