Study: Antidepressant vortioxetine combined with cognitive training may help delay cognitive decline

Can Phar­ma­co­log­i­cal Aug­men­ta­tion of Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Reme­di­ate Age-Relat­ed Cog­ni­tive Decline? (The Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try): A grad­ual decline of cog­ni­tive func­tion and con­cur­rent loss of brain vol­ume is an expect­ed process even in healthy aging. What if, how­ev­er, this process could be delayed, reversed, or even pre­vent­ed? This ques­tion has become increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant as the…

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Cognitive stimulation is beneficial, even after diagnosis of Alzheimer’s

An inter­est­ing arti­cle in Nature Reviews last month reviewed sev­er­al stud­ies show­ing that cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tion can be ben­e­fi­cial even for indi­vid­u­als already diag­nosed with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease (Buschert et al., 2010). The arti­cle shows that patients with mild-to-mod­­er­ate demen­tia can ben­e­fit from a range of cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions: from train­ing of par­tial­ly spared cog­ni­tive func­tions to train­ing on…

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Do You Mind?

Ask your­self the tough ques­tions: Do you mind your brain? Do you know your nog­gin’? Can you claim cere­bral own­er­ship or is your men­tal a rental? Although these ques­tions are rel­e­vant at vir­tu­al­ly all lifes­pan stages, firm answers can some­times appear incon­ceiv­able.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly with advanc­ing age, atten­tion to men­tal per­for­mance is often either aban­doned or…

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Promising Cognitive Training Studies for ADHD

As not­ed in our Mar­ket Report, we expect the field of cog­ni­tive train­ing (or “brain fit­ness”) soft­ware to grow in a vari­ety of edu­ca­tion and health-relat­ed areas over the next years. One of the most promis­ing areas in our view: help­ing chil­dren and adults with atten­tion deficits improve brain func­tion to reduce ADHD symp­toms. I…

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Salon.com on Brain Fitness: Tree or Forest?

Salon.com pub­lished yes­ter­day a thought-pro­­vok­ing arti­cle focused on Posit Sci­ence’s Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, titled Buff Up Your Brain, that com­bined a) some pret­ty good analy­sis and great points about that spe­cif­ic pro­gram and jus­ti­fi­able (to a point) crit­i­cism of the com­mer­cial tone of a recent PBS Spe­cial, with b) the error of con­fus­ing a tree…

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Improving Driving Skills and Brain Functioning- Interview with ACTIVE’s Jerri Edwards

Today we are for­tu­nate to inter­view Dr. Jer­ri Edwards, an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da’s School of Aging Stud­ies and Co-Inves­ti­­ga­­tor of the influ­en­cial ACTIVE study. Dr. Edwards was trained by Dr. Kar­lene K. Ball, and her research is aimed toward dis­cov­er­ing how cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties can be main­tained and even enhanced with advanc­ing age.…

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