Brain Fitness: Definition, Priorities, and Links to Neuroleadership and Human Capital

Yes­ter­day we had a fun ses­sion on Brain Fit­ness dur­ing the Neu­rolead­er­ship Sum­mit tak­ing place now in San Fran­cis­co, explor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to enhance per­for­mance and health of lead­ers and work­forces by deploy­ing both old tools (like breath­ing and med­i­ta­tion) and new ones (such as biofeed­back and data­base-dri­ven per­son­al­ized brain train­ing solu­tions). Here are a cou­ple of the main ideas I want­ed to introduce:

A. Let’s define Brain Fit­ness as an “inte­grat­ed approach to enhance brain func­tion­al­i­ty”, com­bin­ing as appro­pri­ate lifestyle, inva­sive and non-inva­sive options. “Brain fit­ness” is above all an out­come, a cul­ture, sim­i­lar to “phys­i­cal fit­ness” (jok­ing­ly, I also said that “brain fit­ness” is the part of “phys­i­cal fit­ness” that “phys­i­cal fit­ness” does­n’t yet know what to do with)

B. Then, the ques­tion becomes, “what are the most impor­tant brain func­tions to enhance/ develop/ main­tain?”. Here I shared the fol­low­ing results from  the sur­vey includ­ed in our 2010 mar­ket report. When asked, “How impor­tant do you believe are the fol­low­ing brain func­tions to thrive per­son­al­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly in the 21st cen­tu­ry?”, 2,000 respon­dents ranked answers this way (you can click on chart to max­i­mize size):

1. Abil­i­ty to man­age stress­ful situations
2. Con­cen­tra­tion pow­er to avoid distractions
3. Being able to rec­og­nize and man­age one’s emotions
4. Pro­cess­ing new infor­ma­tion quickly
5. Defin­ing and pur­su­ing per­son­al­ly mean­ing­ful goals
6. Being able to mon­i­tor and man­age one’s thought processes
7. Abil­i­ty to deal with new, uncer­tain situations
8. Plan­ning ahead and solv­ing prob­lems in sys­tem­at­ic ways
9. Abil­i­ty to multi-task
10. Remem­ber­ing faces and names

(Note: this sur­vey was­n’t designed to rep­re­sent the cur­rent views of pop­u­la­tion at large, but of the ear­ly-adopters who sub­scribe to our month­ly enewslet­ter and may give us a bet­ter peak into where we are head­ing into.)