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

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.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have found that rats use a mental instant replay of their actions to help them decide what to do next, shedding new light on how animals and humans learn and remember.

“By understanding how thoughts and memories are structured, we can gain insight into how they might be disrupted in diseases and disorders of memory and thought such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia,” said study author Matthew A. Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute. “This understanding may lead to new methods of diagnosis and treatment.”

Wilson’s laboratory explores how rats form and recall memories by recording — with an unprecedented level of accuracy — the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus while the animal is performing tasks, pausing between actions and sleeping. The hippocampus is the seahorse-shaped brain region researchers believe to be critical for learning and memory.

Wilson’s previous work has shown that after the animals run a maze, their brains “replay” during sleep the sequence of events they experienced while awake. Researchers believe this process is key to sleep-reinforced memory consolidation in both animals and humans.

The latest study shows that these sequences also occur when the animals are awake and may help them decide what to do next.

Not-so-instant replay

When a rat moves through a maze, certain neurons called “place cells,” which respond to the animal’s physical environment, fire in patterns and sequences unique to different locations. By looking at the patterns of firing cells, researchers can tell which part of the maze the animal is running.

While the rat is awake but standing still in the maze, its neurons fire in the same pattern of activity that occurred while it was running. The mental replay of sequences of the animals’ experience occurs in both forward and reverse time order.

“This may be the rat equivalent of ‘thinking,’” Wilson said. “This thinking process looks very much like the reactivation of memory that we see during non-REM dream states, consisting of bursts of time-compressed memory sequences lasting a fraction of a second.

“So, thinking and dreaming may share the same memory reactivation mechanisms,” he said.

Memory’s building blocks

“This study brings together concepts related to thought, memory and dreams that all potentially arise from a unified mechanism rooted in the hippocampus,” said co-author Fabian Kloosterman, senior postdoctoral associate.

The team’s results show that long experiences, which in reality could have taken tens of seconds or minutes, are replayed in only a fraction of a second. To do this, the brain links together smaller pieces to construct the memory of the long experience.

The researchers speculated that this strategy could help different areas of the brain share information — and deal with multiple memories that may share content — in a flexible and efficient way. “These results suggest that extended replay is composed of chains of shorter subsequences, which may reflect a strategy for the storage and flexible expression of memories of prolonged experience,” Wilson said.

Moreover, by comparing the content of the replay with the rat’s physical location on the track and his actual behavior immediately before and after the replay event the researchers could tell the rat was not just thinking about his most recent experience but also about other options, such as: “What if I turned around and went back the way I came?” or “How would I get here if my starting point is at a distant location?”

This suggests that the same brain mechanisms come into play to remember the past and consider future actions, reinforcing recent work by neuroscientists outside of MIT who determined that in humans, cognitive processes related to episodic recall and evaluation of future events overlap to a high degree.

Memory formation and future planning are among the cognitive functions ravaged by diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and psychosis.

“A better understanding of how we use memories, not only to learn from past experiences but also to explore our future options, can give us insights into how the system fails under these disease conditions,” Kloosterman said.

The MIT researchers plan to further explore the link between awake replay and cognition in animals engaged in more cognitively demanding tasks such as those involving multiple choices, where the rat has to make a decision (”do I go left or right?”) based on a prior learned rule.

In addition to Wilson, the study was led jointly by Kloosterman and MIT brain and cognitive sciences graduate student Thomas J. Davidson.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Original article here.

Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory conducted learning and memory tasks using transgenic mice that were induced to lose a significant number of brain cells. Following Alzheimer’s-like brain atrophy, the mice acted as though they did not remember tasks they had previously learned.  But after taking HDAC inhibitors, the mice regained their long-term memories and ability to learn new tasks. In addition, mice genetically engineered to produce no HDAC2 at all exhibited enhanced memory formation.

The fact that long-term memories can be recovered by elevated histone acetylation supports the idea that apparent memory “loss” is really a reflection of inaccessible memories, Tsai said. “These findings are in line with a phenomenon known as ‘fluctuating memories,’ in which demented patients experience temporary periods of apparent clarity,” she said.

A team led by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has now pinpointed the exact gene responsible for a 2007 breakthrough in which mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease regained long-term memories and the ability to learn. In the latest development, reported in the May 7 issue of Nature, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and colleagues found that drugs that work on the gene HDAC2 reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s and boost cognitive function in mice.

Original article here

Living with a partner at midlife may lower the risk for Alzheimer’s disease later in life, a new study shows. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that staying socially connected is vital for a healthy and intact brain late in life.

Several studies have shown that lifestyle factors may help to ward off cognitive decline later in life. Education, regular exercise and activity, a mentally challenging job and intellectual activities that might include regularly doing crossword puzzles and word games, have been linked to a sharp memory. Being married and having lots of friends has also been linked to keeping the mind sharp.

In the current study, Scandinavian researchers looked at about 1,500 men and women from Finland at midlife, then again some 20 years later. They found that those who were living with a partner at midlife, around age 50, were least likely to show memory and thinking problems when they were in their late 60s or 70s.

Men and women who were widowed or divorced at midlife and who remained so as seniors were the most likely to have be diagnosed with a condition like Alzheimer’s late in life. The risk was especially high for those who had been widowed and who carried the APOE-E4 gene, a gene that increases the odds of developing Alzheimer’s. Those who were single at midlife were also at increased risk of developing memory problems as seniors compared to those who had been married or partnered in their middle years.

The findings appeared in the British medical journal BMJ. In an editorial that accompanied the findings, a doctor suggests that his colleagues in primary care practice might target unmarried — and especially widowed — people and encourage them “to increase their social engagement” as a means of possible warding off Alzheimer’s disease.

The research is consistent with other evidence showing that staying socially connected with spouses, family and friends helps to preserve memory and keep the brain young. Marriage and partnership is thought to provide social as well as intellectual stimulation that may help to keep the brain working well into old age. The researchers did not look at such factors as the quality of the marriage or the effects of children on outcome. But, they plan to continue their research into this provocative area.

Social interaction may be good for those who care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, too. Dr. Mary Mittelman and colleagues at New York University have shown that maintaining a close network of family and friends who can be called on for emotional support may be critical for easing the stress of caregiving.

See the original article Marriage May Be Good for the Brain

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that currently affects nearly 5% of people 65-year old and over 30% of those 85-year old. It is now estimated that there are 18−24 million people suffering from AD worldwide, two-thirds of whom are living in developed or developing countries, and this number is expected to reach 34 million by 2025. AD is characterized by the progressive accumulation of amyloid beta peptide (Aβ), neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and hyperphosphorylated microtubule-associated tau protein. Many regions involved in memory and learning processes, such as the hippocampus and frontal cortex, show neuron apoptosis several years before clinical signs appear. Today there is no cure for this devastating disease and therefore it is of great interest for researchers to find new drugs that can hinder the disease process.  Current drugs on the market improve the function of still intact neurons, but do not inhibit the ongoing degenerative process leading to neuronal cell death. Curcumin, a biologically active component of turmeric (Curcuma longa) is used as a curry spice and herbal medicine for the treatment of inflammatory conditions, cancer, AIDS and other diseases. Epidemical studies in India, where turmeric is used routinely, show that the incidence of AD between the ages of 70 and 79 years is 4.4-fold less than in the USA.  Results on mice show that a low dose of curcumin significantly suppressed the inflammation, reduced oxidative damage and plaque burden and decreased the amount of insoluble amyloid. Compared to other antioxidant drugs, such as NSAID or ibuprofen, curcumin had fewer side effects. Evidence suggests that metals are concentrated in the AD brain and curcumin is a chelator which can bind the iron and copper (but not zinc) on beta amyloid, which may be one mechanism potentially contributing to amyloid reduction. In vivo, curcumin may protect cells from the beta amyloid attack and subsequent oxidative stress-induced damage in the antioxidant pathway. The findings of a previous study prove curcumin can induce cognitive improvement by enhancing the cholinergic system and its antioxidant activity. The studies on curcumin are incomplete and there needs to be further investigation of its neuroprotective mechanism.

See the research study here

Two studies published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association add to evidence that long-term lifestyle habits may reduce the risk of mental decline in old age.

The first study, a long-term look at 1,880 elderly people in New York City, found that a Mediterranean-type diet and physical activity each were linked to less risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center released the data as part of a larger research project on aging.

The second study, a shorter-term observation of 1,410 patients in France, found some correlation between a Mediterranean-type diet and slower cognitive damage.

Nikolaos Scarmeas, the author of the first study, grew up eating fish and vegetables in Athens, Greece. Now the neurologist suggests more people take up his mother’s cooking. Marked by high consumption of foods such as vegetables, legumes and cereals, served with olive oil, in addition to moderate fish and alcohol intake, the traditional diet has long conferred better cardiovascular health.

Starting in 1992, researchers at Columbia University monitored elderly patients every 18 months for diet, exercise and mental health, in addition to a number of controls including age, sex and education. “This is one of the first studies to tease apart the independent contributions of diet and exercise for dementia prevention,” says Ronald Petersen, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who was not involved in the research. “It suggests that aging need not be a passive process.”

These studies are observational and not definitive, but they hint at what might reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s or dementia. In the Columbia research, those who adhered most closely to the diet reduced their risk for Alzheimer’s by 40%, while those with the highest physical activity decreased their risk 33%, compared with people who didn’t adhere closely to the diet or were not physically active.

The French study found that subjects who adhered to the Mediterranean-type diet experienced a slower rate of mental decline than those who did not eat the diet, but did not prove a link for dementia, which requires a clinical assessment of a variety of mental and social functions.

Doctors in the field are careful to note that none of these findings demonstrate a causal relationship, but instead reflect the advantages of a continual healthy lifestyle. “The benefits don’t just occur at age 70 when you suddenly stop eating McDonald’s and start eating Brussels sprouts,” says David Knopman, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who wrote the editorial accompanying the studies in JAMA and wasn’t involved in either study. His editorial highlights confounding variables in the studies. “Healthy diet and exercise is part of a package of lifelong healthy living.”

Zaven Khachaturian, a senior science adviser to the Alzheimer’s Association, agrees. “This offers interesting insight but we need to turn it now into clinical trials,” says the former director of the Office of Alzheimer’s Disease Research at the National Institutes of Health.

These findings arrive a few weeks after new research identified a gene that could help predict who will develop Alzheimer’s—the leading cause of dementia—and at what age. The report, given in mid-July at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease, concentrated on DNA surrounding the ApoE gene. Researchers say more studies are needed before the findings can be confirmed.

For now, Dr. Scarmeas says his studies strongly suggest that a Mediterranean diet and exercise both confer independent and positive health benefits. But together, they are even better.

“The relative risk reduction for Alzheimer’s is about 60% when you combine the diet and exercise,” he says.

Original Article by carrie.porter@wsj.com