cognitive-training-programs

Michael Merzenich: Brain Plasticity offers Hope for Everyone

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“What­ev­er you strug­gle with in a sense as it stems from your neu­rol­o­gy, the inher­ent plas­tic­i­ty of the brain gives you a basis for improve­ment. This is a way under­uti­lized and under-appre­ci­at­ed resource that well all have.” Dr. Michael Merzenich on the Brain Sci­ence Pod­cast #54, 2/13/09.

Recent­ly there has been grow­ing con­tro­ver­sy about the effec­tive­ness of com­put­er-based cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams. As a co-founder of Posit Sci­ence, Inc. Dr. Michael Merzenich is a staunch defend­er of the meth­ods his com­pa­ny uses to val­i­date the pro­grams that they have devel­oped. But for the pur­pos­es of this essay, I want to share some of the key ideas we dis­cussed dur­ing his recent inter­view on the Brain Sci­ence Podcast.

First of all, I asked him to dis­cuss some of the high­lights of his long career. Since he was one of the first neu­ro­sci­en­tists to embrace the con­cepts of neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty I was curi­ous about how this came about. While he did have some expo­sure to the ani­mal evi­dence as a grad­u­ate stu­dent, it was actu­al­ly his expe­ri­ence with the inven­tion of the cochlear implant that con­vinced Dr. Merzenich of the real-world, prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions of brain plas­tic­i­ty. The qual­i­ty of the [Read more…] about Michael Merzenich: Brain Plas­tic­i­ty offers Hope for Everyone

Cognitive Health Pioneers: Thank You!

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Busy as we have been, we only recent­ly com­piled the list of orga­ni­za­tions who have pur­chased our Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket Report so far. We were impressed by the qual­i­ty and vari­ety rep­re­sent­ed, and the cross-sec­tor demand for qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion in the emerg­ing brain fitness/ cog­ni­tive health cat­e­go­ry. See­ing the list helps us pri­or­i­tize efforts and cov­er­age of mar­ket and research news and trends.

Below you have a selec­tion of main cat­e­gories, and a few select­ed clients:

  • Research cen­ters and uni­ver­si­ties: Har­vard Med­ical School, US Army Research Lab, MaRS Dis­cov­ery Dis­trict, Ore­gon Cen­ter for Applied Sci­ence, Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan.
  • Old­er adults orga­ni­za­tions and com­mu­ni­ties: AARP, Sun­rise Senior Liv­ing, Bel­mont Vil­lage Senior Living.
  • Health­care Providers: Sut­ter Health, Memo­r­i­al Hos­pi­tal Health Sys­tem, Neu­ro­Care Net­work, Mindme­di Clin­ic. [Read more…] about Cog­ni­tive Health Pio­neers: Thank You!

Working Memory Training and ADD/ADHD

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Mark Katz, a San Diego clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist with decades of expe­ri­ence help­ing ADD/ ADHD kids and adults, and for­mer Board Mem­ber of CHADD, and I had a very good meet­ing with a few school super­in­ten­dents on Saturday.

We dis­cussed the research state-of-the-art, cur­rent ADD/ ADHD inter­ven­tions and the future of pre­ven­tion-dri­ven interventions.

Some high­lights from our talk:

- More and more researchers are com­ing to see that the label “Atten­tion deficit” was prob­a­bly not the most for­tu­nate one. Kids and adults with ADD/ ADHD can pay atten­tion, when they are engaged in cer­tain tasks, so the under­ly­ing prob­lem is not a deficit of attention.

- ADD/ ADHD is not a prob­lem of know­ing, but a prob­lem of doing. The bot­tle­neck may reside in exec­u­tive func­tions such as so-called work­ing mem­o­ry. The prob­lem is exe­cu­tion, inter­nal­ized behav­ior, not con­cep­tu­al knowledge.

- For more infor­ma­tion on Exec­u­tive func­tions, you can check the excel­lent review in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try, of Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg’s book The Exec­u­tive Brain

- Work­ing mem­o­ry is the abil­i­ty to hold dif­fer­ent things on line and manip­u­late them in real time in order to solve a prob­lem, com­plete a task…

- When asked if “work­ing mem­o­ry” and “short-term mem­o­ry” are the same, Mark explained that they refer to sim­i­lar con­cepts, if not the same, but that researchers stopped using the term “short-term” mem­o­ry many years ago, to make it clear that it is an active, not pas­sive, skill. In fact, he added, maybe it should be called “work­ing atten­tion” rather than “work­ing memory”.

- We dis­cussed the for­tu­nate trend that many schools are migrat­ing towards a pub­lic health mod­el in help­ing kids with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties and ADD/ ADHD, focus­ing on more pre­ven­tion at ear­ly ages than on reac­tive inter­ven­tions to major problems.

- Work­ing mem­o­ry may be trained by tar­get­ed cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams sup­port­ed such as RoboMemo, a pro­gram that I came to know last year after a good Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can arti­cle that high­light­ed their clin­i­cal study with kids with ADD/ ADHD pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Child and Ado­les­cent Psychiatry.