To develop personalized brain training that works, gather and analyze big data

— The Brain-Games Conun­drum: Does Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Real­ly Sharp­en the Mind? (Cere­brum): “…the issue of what does and doesn’t work is complex…The crit­i­cal ques­tion is whether trans­fer of train­ing occurs. Does extend­ed prac­tice of the trained games result in gen­er­al per­cep­tu­al and cog­ni­tive improve­ments that boost per­for­mance of mean­ing­ful, real-life tasks such as dri­ving, remembering…

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Train your brain with targeted videogames, not with crossword puzzles

Study shows men­tal agili­ty game slows cog­ni­tive decline in old­er peo­ple (Iowa Now): “Wolin­sky and col­leagues sep­a­rat­ed 681 gen­er­al­ly healthy med­ical patients in Iowa into four groups—each fur­ther sep­a­rat­ed into those 50 to 64 years of age and those over age 65. One group was giv­en com­put­er­ized cross­word puz­zles, while three oth­er groups were exposed to…

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Study: Music Training Can Enhance Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function

Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Short-Term Music Train­ing Enhances Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion. Abstract: Researchers have designed train­ing meth­ods that can be used to improve men­tal health and to test the effi­ca­cy of edu­ca­tion pro­grams. How­ev­er, few stud­ies have demon­strat­ed broad trans­fer from such train­ing to per­for­mance on untrained cog­ni­tive activities.…

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Brain Fitness Survey: We Need More Brain Awareness Weeks!

If you sub­scribe to our month­ly newslet­ter, you may remem­ber we ran a sur­vey in Jan­u­ary. Well, the response rate and the qual­i­ty of the respons­es were noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar, in many dimen­sions. The respons­es from over 2,000 par­tic­i­pants (out of 21,000 sub­scribers) rein­force the need for pub­lic aware­ness ini­tia­tives and qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion to…

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