Marian Diamond, UC-Berkeley: “People frequently do the same level of crossword puzzles to stimulate their brains year after year. They do not challenge their brains with more difficult levels of puzzles. In our research, we showed that if we challenged the rats to reach their food cups by having to climb over many obstructions, their brains increased more than those of rats who could walk unhindered to their food cups. Challenge increased brain size.”
Tom Warden, Allstate: “… we see the opportunity that cognitive training provides as just the next evolution of things that we can advocate and get behind that ultimately make for a better driving experience, a safer driving experience for people. Not only for our insureds, but to help the roads be safer for everyone…what we did is to attempt to replicate the results that were observed in the laboratory environment where older drivers who have completed a good amount of training, 10 hours or more of training, had shown that the risk of crash could be reduced by up to about 50%.”
David Whitehouse, OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions: “Managed care has not always been on the forefront of innovation and it has been, for us, a challenge and an excitement to think about how best to incorporate the latest findings in neuroscience. If I was to give you the major areas that we think are important, one is the importance of neuroscience capabilitties to improve triage, the second is the importance that this has on increasing access to much better functional assessments and its relationship to safety. The third is in the area of clinical decision support and the fourth is in brain health. First and foremost, why is it that in every other organ we have objective data of the organ itself doing its work under various loads to help us when we need to make decisions about its health and disease state and how best to support it and intervene.”
William Reichman, Baycrest: “…we must do for brain health in the 21st century what we largely accomplished in cardiovascular health in the past century…that includes an increased focus not only on tertiary prevention, but on primary and secondary prevention…approximately a year and a half ago the Ontario government made a decision to invest $10 million in Canada’s first centre for brain fitness to be housed at Baycrest at the Rotman Research Institute.…Here in Canada I think that we’ve been able to make a compelling case maintaining good brain fitness needs to be a national priority for this country and we have been engaged in discussions with the government, both federally and provincially, that brain health programs really need to begin in childhood.”
P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke University: “… you don’t want to walk into a grocery store or into a gas station and see a brain game claiming that they’re a neuroplasticity brain game or a bottle of water that’s claiming it’s a cognitive reserve enhancer because then I think you’re going to destroy the whole field key…So I think it’s essential for academia, for industry, for think tanks, for even the federal government agencies such as perhaps England, US, Canada, to come together and form a set of guidelines that can really guide the proper development of a lot of these products and by products I’m talking about two types of products. One is cognitive screening instruments and the second is intervention products to either improve sort of normal functioning or to increase resilience to stress or three, to prevent disease.”
(answering to audience question, “when do you believe that cognitive screening may become a pretty routine part of standard medical care”) “I think it’s long overdue…the brain is the most important organ.”
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In January of 2010 SharpBrains produced the inaugural virtual, global SharpBrains Summit on Technology for Cognitive Health and Performance (January 18–20th, 2010). The Summit featured a dream team of over 40 speakers who are leaders in industry and research to discuss emerging research, tools and best practices for cognitive health and performance, and gathered over 250 participants in 16 countries.
Are you interested in what over 40 leading scientists, clinicians, executives and technologists have to say about the latest Technology for Cognitive Health and Performance? Want to hear how they responded to more than 200 audience questions? You can Learn more Here (full transcripts are now available). SharpBrains readers can get a 15% discount using discount code: sharptech
