OReilly-Emerging-Technology-Conference

Brain Training Games: Context, Trends, Questions

by

A spate of recent news cov­er­age on brain fit­ness and “brain train­ing” reflects a grow­ing inter­est in nat­ur­al, non-drug-based inter­ven­tions to keep our brains sharp as we age. This inter­est is very time­ly, giv­en the aging pop­u­la­tion, increas­ing Alzheimer’s rates, and soar­ing health care costs that place more empha­sis than ever on pre­ven­tion and chang­ing lifestyle.

This past Tues­day, the MIT Club of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and Smart­Sil­vers spon­sored an event on The Emerg­ing Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket: Build­ing Bet­ter Brains to explore the real­i­ties and myths of this grow­ing field. The pan­el was mod­er­at­ed by Zack Lynch, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Neu­rotech­nol­o­gy Indus­try Orga­ni­za­tion, and com­posed of a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and 3 CEOs of pro­gram devel­op­ers in the field. Before the pan­el, I had the chance to present an overview of the state of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket based on our upcom­ing report to be released on March 4th.

Why are we talk­ing about this field at all? Well, for one, an increas­ing num­ber of com­pa­nies are achiev­ing sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial suc­cess in pack­ag­ing “brain exer­cise”. An exam­ple is the line of Nin­ten­do games, such as Brain Age and Brain Train­ing, that have shipped over 15 mil­lion units world­wide despite lim­it­ed sci­en­tif­ic sup­port, since 2005. What is less vis­i­ble is that a num­ber of com­pa­nies and sci­en­tists are [Read more…] about Brain Train­ing Games: Con­text, Trends, Questions

“Cells that fire together wire together” and Stanford Media X

by

That is the goal of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Media X: to fos­ter deep col­lab­o­ra­tions between indus­try and acad­e­mia, as high­light­ed in Busi­ness Week’s recent arti­cle The Vir­tu­al Meet­ing Room. The 5th Annu­al Media X Con­fer­ence on Research, Col­lab­o­ra­tion, Inno­va­tion and Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty served its pur­pose well for the last cou­ple of days: very fun and insight­ful pre­sen­ta­tions by Stan­ford researchers (and a few exter­nal experts) and a great list of par­tic­i­pants to get to know.

No doubt, a great source of men­tal stim­u­la­tion for all of us. Charles House, Media X’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, framed the dia­logue as an effort to gen­er­ate the right ques­tions and then engage the best minds in answer­ing them.

Some of (my) main take-aways

  • “The world does not come to us as neat dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems, but as com­plex inter­dis­ci­pli­nary chal­lenges” (great quote by Dean John Hen­nessy)
  • Per­son­al Robot­ics is poised to explode soon-and soft­ware will be key (pre­dict­ed by Paul Saffo)
  • An incon­ve­nient truth: Al Gore had to be con­vinced to bring his pre­sen­ta­tion into a movie, since he was very attached to each and every of his X hun­dred slides. We are hap­py it happened!
  • Neu­ro­sci­en­tists know what pat­terns in the brain indi­cate cer­tain inten­tions-and are start­ing to use tech­nolo­gies to help immo­bi­lized patients com­mu­ni­cate with exter­nal devices based mere­ly on their thoughts
  • We need to learn to embrace change- a lot of it is coming!

Now, some key points from sev­er­al pre­sen­ta­tions (there were more than these, but I could­n’t attend all). I encour­age you to vis­it the web­site of each pre­sen­ter if you are inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about that topic.

a. Paul Saf­fo on Inno­va­tion