The Benefits of a One-Time Cognitive Training Program Do Last but Wane Over Time

By Dr. Pascale Michelon | March 15, 2011 |

Do you remem­ber the IMPACT study pub­lished in 2009? It was a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­al with healthy old­er adults that com­pared a com­put­er-based cog­ni­tive pro­gram that trains audi­tory pro­cess­ing (Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram, Posit Sci­ence) with edu­ca­tion­al video pro­grams (con­trol group). Peo­ple who used the pro­gram improved in the trained tasks, which was not that surprising,…

Read More

Posit Science, Nintendo Brain Age, and Brain Training Topics

By Alvaro Fernandez | June 24, 2008 |

A few col­leagues referred me over the week­end to a very nice arti­cle at busi­ness pub­li­ca­tion Port­fo­lio. While the arti­cle does an excel­lent job at intro­duc­ing the read­er to the con­cept and promise of com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive assess­ments, it also con­tributes to the mythol­o­gy of “Brain Age”.  Let’s first take a look at the arti­cle How…

Read More

Nintendo BrainAge, Lumosity, Happy Neuron, MyBrainTrainer…

By Alvaro Fernandez | July 17, 2007 |

A col­lec­tion of recent announce­ment in the “brain games” or “brain train­ing games” space: The Wii sets new gen­er­a­tional stan­dards for the videogame indus­try “The age­ing of the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion com­pelled gamemak­er Nin­ten­do to widen its audi­ence. Now, the Wii is lead­ing the indus­try stan­dards. But hard­core gamers are still too impor­tant to be neglected.”…

Read More

Neurogenesis and How Learning Saves Your Neurons

By Caroline Latham | October 31, 2006 |

Jon Bar­ron’s blog high­light­ed this recent press release from The Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science. For decades, it was believed that the adult brain did not pro­duce new neu­rons after birth. But that notion has been dis­pelled by research in the last ten years. It became clear by the mid- to late-1990’s that the brain does, in…

Read More