Stop Neglecting Your Brain

When you exercise your body, do you only work on one arm or just your abdomen? Of course not, you want a balanced workout that works out all your muscles. You need to do the same thing with your brain. When you were in college, you often took courses that were outside your field of concentration to make sure you had a broad background. Do you still do activities to work on many areas of your brain?

Myfitbrain pushes you to use cognitive areas of your brain that you rarely use and have begun to atrophy. Over time, neural connections that are not used will begin to decay. By performing mind activities that you do not usually engage in, you can reactivate those brain circuits. If you push your brain in those rarely used areas, you will actually increase the neural connections and increase your brain’s mass. If you get a head injury or similar brain problem, you will have a stronger base from which to recover or fight off the disease.

So, get out of your rut and do your brain a favor by doing something new. Challenge your brain and it will pay you back by being healthy longer than if you do the same thing every day.

Have you tried any of the new games?

Since your last visit many months ago, Myfitbrain has added several new challenging games and features. Now you can set the overall level that you start the games at. If you felt they were too easy, set your level in your profile for Intermediate or Experienced. If you want to brag to your friends on Twitter or Facebook how you are progressing, you can do that. So, come back and challenge your brain, it will thank you for taking some time to push it and have fun.

Try Myfitbrain games

In his speech to America’s schoolchildren last month, President Obama had a clear directive about video games: Put them away. It wasn’t the first time he had sounded this particular alarm, warning of the dangers of days spent at gaming consoles. But the latest science shows that there’s a lot more to video games than their dark reputations suggest.

“There’s still a tendency to think of video games as a big wad of time-wasting content,’’ said Cheryl Olson, co-director of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You would never hear a parent say we don’t allow books in our home, but you’ll still hear parents say we don’t allow video games in our home.

“Games are a medium. They’re not inherently good or bad.’’

After years of focusing on the bad – and there are still legitimate concerns, for instance, about the psychological effects of certain violent games – scientists are increasingly examining the potential benefits of video games. Their studies are revealing that a wide variety of games can boost mental function, improving everything from vision to memory. Still unclear is whether these gains are long-lasting and can be applied to non-game tasks. But video games, it seems, might actually be good for the brain.

The very structure of video games makes them ideal tools for brain training.

“Video games are hard,’’ said Eric Klopfer, the director of MIT’s Education Arcade, which studies and develops educational video games. “People don’t like to play easy games, and games have figured out a way to encourage players to persist at solving challenging problems.’’

The games aren’t just hard – they’re adaptively hard. They tend to challenge people right at the edge of their abilities; as players get better and score more points, they move up to more demanding levels of play. This adaptive challenge is “stunningly powerful’’ for learning, said John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at MIT.

Most games involve a huge number of mental tasks, and playing can boost any one of them. Fast-paced, action-packed video games have been shown, in separate studies, to boost visual acuity, spatial perception, and the ability to pick out objects in a scene. Complex, strategy-based games can improve other cognitive skills, including working memory and reasoning.

These findings fit with scientists’ increasing understanding of how malleable the human brain truly is. Researchers now know that learning and practicing a challenging task can actually change the brain.

Richard Haier,a pediatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine, has shown in a pair of studies that the classic game Tetris, in which players have to rotate and direct rapidly falling blocks, alters the brain. In a paper published last month, Haier and his colleagues showed that after three months of Tetris practice, teenage girls not only played the game better, their brains became more efficient.

A type of scan that illuminates brain activity showed that at the end of the three months, the girls’ brains were working less hard to complete the game’s challenges. What’s more, parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker. Several of these regions are associated with visual spatial abilities, planning, and integration of sensory data.

“Does this mean that Tetris is good for your brain?’’ Haier said. “That is the big question. We don’t know that just because you become better at playing Tetris after practice and your brain changes . . . whether those changes generalize to anything else.’’

Generalizability to non-game situations is the big question surrounding other emerging games, particularly software that is being marketed explicitly as a way to keep neurons spry as we age. The jury is still out on whether practicing with these games helps people outside of the context of the game. In one promising 2008 study, however, senior citizens who started playing Rise of Nations, a strategic video game devoted to acquiring territory and nation building, improved on a wide range of cognitive abilities, performing better on subsequent tests of memory, reasoning, and multitasking. The tests were administered after eight weeks of training on the game. No follow-up testing was done to assess whether the gains would last.

Now that researchers know these off-the-shelf games can have wide-ranging benefits, they’re trying to home in on the games’ most important aspects, potentially allowing designers to create new games that specifically boost brain power.

“Until now, people have been asking can you learn anything from games?’’ MIT’s Klopfer said. “That’s a less interesting question than what aspects of games are important for fostering learning.’’

Klopfer is currently conducting research to determine how important narrative is in an educational physics game: Do students learn more with a more narrative game? And Anne McLaughlin, a psychologist who co-directs the Gains Through Gaming lab at North Carolina State University, is assessing whether games that are novel, include social interaction, and require intense focus are better at boosting cognitive skills. McLaughlin and her colleagues will use the findings to design games geared toward improving mental function among the elderly.

Other researchers are hoping to use video games to encourage prosocial behaviors – actions designed to help others. (“Prosocial’’ behaviors are, in some ways, the opposite of “antisocial’’ ones.) In June, an international team of researchers, including several from Iowa State University, reported that middle school students in Japan who played games in which characters helped or showed affection for others, later engaged in more of these behaviors themselves. Researchers also found that US college students randomly assigned to play a prosocial game were subsequently kinder to a fellow research subject than students who played violent or neutral games.

Unlike, say, movies or books, video games don’t just have content, they also have rules. A game is set up to reward certain actions and to punish others. This means they have immense potential to teach children ethics and values, said Scott Seider, an assistant professor of education at Boston University. (Of course, this is a double-edged sword. Games could reward negative, antisocial behavior just as easily as positive, prosocial behavior.)

Some off-the-shelf games already contain strong prosocial themes; consider The Sims, for instance, or the classic Oregon Trail, which make players responsible for the well-being of other characters and feature characters who take care of one another. But Seider also hopes game developers consider the prosocial possibilities in developing new games. The challenge for the architects of future games will be figuring out how to wrap virtuous characteristics into an engaging package.

“Ultimately, the video game needs to be an entertaining experience,’’ Seider said. “The game has to be fun.’’

Original article here

Myfitbrain games

Complex tasks like juggling produce significant changes to the structure of the brain, according to scientists at Oxford University.

In the journal, Nature Neuroscience, the scientists say they saw a 5% increase in white matter – the cabling network of the brain.

The people who took part in the study were trained for six weeks and had brain scans before and after.

Long term it could aid treatments for diseases like multiple sclerosis.

The team at Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurology used a diffusion MRI which is able to measure the movement of water molecules in the tissues of the brain.

The signal changes according to how many bundles of nerve fibres there are and how tightly packed they are.

Changes in grey matter, where the processing and computation in the brain happens, have been shown before, but enhancements in the white matter have not previously been demonstrated.

The scientists studied a group of 24 healthy young adults, none of whom could juggle.
They divided them into two groups.

One of the groups was given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and was asked to practice 30 minutes every day the other 12 continued as normal.

After training, the 12 jugglers could perform at least two continuous cycles of the classic three ball cascade.

Both groups were scanned using diffusion MRI before and after the training.

At the six week point, a 5% increase in white matter was shown in a rear section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus for the jugglers.

This area has been shown to contain nerves that react to us reaching and grasping for objects in our peripheral vision.

There was a great variation in the ability of the volunteers to juggle but all of them showed changes in white matter.

The Oxford team said this must be down to the time spent training and practising rather than the level of skill attained.

Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, said: “MRI is an indirect way to measure brain structure and so we cannot be sure exactly what is changing when these people learn.

“Future work should test whether these results reflect changes in the shape or number of nerve fibres, or growth of the insulating myelin sheath surrounding the fibres.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone should go out and start juggling to improve their brains.

“We chose juggling purely as a complex new skill for people to learn.”

Dr Johansen-Berg said there were clinical applications for this work but there were a long way off.

She said: “Knowing that pathways in the brain can be enhanced may be significant in the long run in coming up with new treatments for neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, where these pathways become degraded.”

Professor Cathy Price, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, said: “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections.

“This compliments other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects.”

See original article here

Myfitbrain brain games

Various studies involving brain scans found that every thought that passes through your mind affects your brain just like an action would. For example, when you practice a certain skill over a period of time, your brain will learn and thus you will master the skill. But a scientific study showed that mental practice alone can yield the same result. This sort of visualizations, thus stimulates the brain. Stimulation encourages neurogenesis. Scientists have always observed how people who think positively tend to live a healthier life – now they know why.

You don’t use, you lose. This is the first principle that governs the way your brain works. I mentioned previously how practice makes perfect. This is because as you practice, your brain grow new brain cells, called neurons, and creates synapses between those neurons.  Synapses allow the brain to work more efficiently by creating cause-and-effect relationships between neurons. Neurons that fire together, wire together through these synapses so that they’ll always fire together.

But these synapses break down if the neurons no longer fire together. Thus if you spend most of your time sitting down, or if you live an extremely sedentary life, it is inevitable for you to lose your ability to balance yourself on your legs as the synapses in you motor cortex breaks down.  This can be seen in people who were in a serious accident and had their legs in a cast for months on end. Though physiologically we should not have any problem walking, they often couldn’t because they need to relearn it.  Thus frequent exercise, something as simple as a slow walk, could prevent you from losing your independence later in old age. The same applies to your memory and your learning ability. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Neurogenesis require energy to be carried out. Most of the energy that you possess, you acquire from your diet. Thus by consuming a healthy diet is crucial to a health brain. Stimulation alone will not be sufficient if your brain do not have the building block for neurogenesis.

Generally speaking, any food beneficial for your body will be beneficial for your brain. The first change you should make to your diet is to consume more leafy green vegetables. This is because they contain large amount of anti-oxidants, which combat the process of oxidation. As you might have known, oxidation kills cells – including brain cells.

But there’s one particular vitamin that I want to single out here in this article. Vitamin B12, is crucial for normal cognitive function but unfortunately, it cannot be found in any plant source. Beef and eggs are excellent sources of B12 but if you’re a vegan, be sure to supplement your diet with this vitamin.  Extreme cases of B12 deficiency can cause psychosis and mania.

You can get most brain stimulation from your daily life. But if you want to reverse a particular condition – say memory loss or even Alzheimer’s – or if you want to improve a particular function of your brain, I would recommend that you perform specially designed brain exercises.   There are various brain exercises, ranging from those that stimulate auditory processing to those that stimulates visual processing. Because these exercises are specially designed, they are generally more effective at correcting a specific problem than general techniques that you can do yourself.

Brain exercises that targets the auditory processing, for example, increases your ability to make out sounds and thus allows you to remember verbal stimulus better (things that you hear). Those that targets visual processing, on the other hand, allows you react faster and remember visual stimulus better (such as the written word and facial recognition).

Thus it is a mistake to assume that brain exercises benefits only the older generation. Fact is, everyone could use a little brain exercises to improve mental functions.

The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are still deep puzzles yet to be solved.

One of the earliest and most noted studies in the field was conducted back in 1992 by neuroscientist Richard Haier at the University of California at Irvine, who looked at how frequent sessions with the Tetris video game changed the players’ brains. The game requires players to fit colorful puzzle pieces together at a quickening pace as they fall from the top of the screen.

Back then, Haier used brain scans to discover that some parts of the brain actually used less glucose as the players became more skilled at the game. The “Tetris effect” illustrated how video-game training could make brains work more efficiently – an idea that eventually led to a whole host of brain-training games.

Now Haier serves as a consultant to Blue Planet Software, the company that markets Tetris, and he was asked to follow up on his 17-year-old research using the new tools available to neuroscientists.

Haier recruited three colleagues – Sherif Karama from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Leonard Leyba from the New Mexico-based Mind Research Network and Rex Jung, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico. They came up with an experiment that budgeted out at “under $100,000,” with the expense picked by Blue Planet, Haier said.

The company had no say in how the experiment was conducted – and it didn’t get an advance look at the resulting research, which was published online today in BMC Research Notes, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. “This was kind of a labor of love,” Haier told me.

The researchers recruited 26 girls, aged 12 to 15. Adolescents were selected because their developing brains were more likely to reflect changes, and girls were selected because they tend to have less experience with video games than boys. Fifteen of the girls were given the task of playing the video game for an average of 90 minutes a week over the course of three months. The others were told to avoid playing video games.

Both groups were monitored for changes in brain function as well as brain structure. Earlier research conducted in Germany had shown that juggling practice led to a thickening in areas of the cerebral cortex, so Haier and his colleagues were pretty sure they’d find a link between what they saw in the functional MRI (about more efficient brain function) and in the structural MRI (about cortex thickening).

And that’s where the brain puzzle threw them for a new loop.

“In science, everyone makes a very big deal about having a hypothesis before you go on a fishing expedition,” Haier said. “Never once in 20 years has my hypothesis worked out the way I thought it would. The brain is always a surprise.”

The researchers analyzed the brain changes in the game-playing group compared with the control group, and they found that the Tetris players’ brain function became more efficient in areas linked to critical thinking, reasoning, language and information processing – just as Haier found in 1992. They also discovered that the cortex became thicker – just as the German researchers had discovered. The only problem was … they weren’t the same areas.

“We all were surprised when we put the images together and saw that there was no overlap,” Haier said. The cortex became thicker in areas of the brain linked to the planning of complex movements as well as the coordination of sensory information.

Haier had hoped that he and his colleagues would come up with a mechanism to explain in physiological terms how the brain became more efficient through game-playing. “The obvious thing would be if you get more brain tissue, you have more neurons to work on a problem, so therefore that area of the brain doesn’t have to work as hard,” he said.

Now he realizes the problem isn’t as simple as he thought. “What this study does, really, is lay the groundwork for a whole series of studies to untangle all this,” he said.

In a news release, the University of New Mexico’s Jung said he’d like to see what happens to game-playing brains over time.

“We hope to continue this work with larger, more diverse samples to investigate whether the brain changes we measured revert back when the subjects stop playing Tetris,” Jung said. “Similarly, we are interested if the skills learned in Tetris, and the associated brain changes, transfer to other cognitive areas such as working memory, processing speed, or spatial reasoning.”

Haier would love to figure out how the different areas of the brain interact during mental training, on a time scale of milliseconds. But that job may be beyond the capability of functional MRI scans, which can monitor changes only on the scale of seconds. “If we’re interested in information flow in the millisecond range, by the time fMRI can see it, it’s too late,” Haier said.

So Haier is setting his sights on yet another new technology, and it’s a real mouthful. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, monitors the faint magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical activity. Haier thinks MEG scans could reveal how the parts of the brain that become more efficient interact with the parts that develop thicker tissue.

“The time resolution of this technology is a millisecond, so you can see changes in the brain millisecond by millisecond,” he said.

As Haier talked about how he’d design those future experiments in game-playing, which would have to be conducted within a magnetically shielded environment, I could tell he was already trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in his mind.

“I want to know what the heck is going on in those brains,” he said.

Brain games can definitely fire up your neurons and help you learn new skills — at least as they relate to the games themselves. But psychologists and neurologists still have one big question: Does mastering any of these brain training games really improve a person’s thinking in real life? Can getting better at playing rock-paper-scissors, tracking birds on a screen or fielding rapid-fire math questions really help a person manage schedules, remember names and keep up with work? And can such mental gymnastics slow, or reverse, cognitive decline?

Many studies have found that staying mentally active throughout one’s life — via education, intellectually challenging work, a rich social life and demanding hobbies such as playing a musical instrument — can improve overall memory skills and create a buffer zone that protects the brain from age-related losses. But very few studies have looked at the effect of brain-training games, and none of those tracked real-life results, says Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at USC.

“We don’t know if you improve anything beyond the activities that you practice,” she says.

Still, there’s new reason to think that at least one brain-training regimen might offer lasting and far-reaching benefits. Zelinski and a team of other researchers recently tested the Brain Fitness computer program on a group of nearly 500 mentally sharp seniors 65 and older. The study was partially funded by Posit Science, which sells Brain Fitness, but Zelinski says she has no financial ties to the company or the product. Half of the group used the program one hour a day, five days a week, for eight weeks. The other half spent an equal amount of time watching educational DVDs and answering quizzes about the shows.

As published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in April, follow-up tests showed that the Brain Fitness group had better attention and memory than the DVD group, even on tasks that were completely different from their training. (Memorizing a list of written words, for example.) Although the researchers didn’t specifically look for real-world improvements, the subjects using the Brain Fitness program did say that memory, focus and overall thinking skills improved after eight weeks of training.

“That was encouraging,” says Glenn Smith, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn. And the results caught him by surprise.

View rest of article here

July 20, 2009
BY BRAD SPIRRISON chicagotechmatters@gmail.com

While popular exercise-focused video games like those played on Nintendo’s Wii Fitness appear to have some health benefits, brain games designed to enhance mental fitness are striving for clinical and commercial acceptance.

“We are learning that people can push out the natural effects of aging by playing cognitive games,” says Jim Hanekamp, founder of Glenview-based My Fit Brain.

Hanekamp, 53, started the company last year after his mother began to show early signs of Alzheimer’s. His research showed that while brain exercises could do little to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s, they could positively impact neural growth earlier in life. This, in theory, could delay memory loss and other effects of brain aging.

The former corporate technology director has invested about $70,000 and months of salary-free time to develop a suite of brain training games found at www.myfitbrain.com. Games with titles like “Pair Em Up” and “CodeBreaker” test memory and logic function, and increase in difficulty based on the cognitive capacity of the user.

While Nintendo and neuroscience specialist Lumosity market paid and subscription-based games, everything on My Fit Brain is free to the user. Hanekamp, who has recruited 1,200 registered users and thousands more visitors to the site, hopes eventually to make money from advertisers.

“We have a new, patent-pending way to incorporate advertising within the game itself,” he said.

Although Hanekamp has had a tough go landing advertisers and investors — he was told he needs between 10,000 and 100,000 registered users to be a viable marketing channel — the company has contained costs by outsourcing its development to India and hosting the site on Amazon’s cloud computing service.

My Fit Brain is marketed largely via word-of-mouth, fueled by an instructive and regularly updated blog on the site that focuses on cognitive fitness issues.

Chicago Sun-Times article by Brad Spirrison