Use it or lose it!

Pilot study by Alzheimers Australia (WA) finds regular brain exercises are the key to healthy ageing

Just two hours of brain exercises a week can markedly improve a person’s mental capacity and help fight age-related memory loss according to a recent study by Alzheimer’s Australia WA.

· Participants found improvements in their memory and were able to follow conversations better.
· Brain has the ability to change in response to new learning.
· Exercising the brain reduces the risk of developing dementia in later years.

The “Brain Fitness Pilot Project” involved people aged in their 60s, 70s and 80s from retirement villages and seniors fitness centres, taking part in a structured brain fitness program two hours per week over an eight-week period.

The program consisted of a series of computer-based hearing exercises aimed at sharpening a person’s ability to take in speech so that the brain can hear and remember more details.

While a majority of participants reported an improvement in their train of thought and could remember names and shopping lists better, another 70 percent found an improvement in their hearing and their ability to follow and remember conversations.

Alzheimer’s Australia WA Chief Executive Officer Frank Schaper said the study demonstrated that a regular program of brain exercises will reduce the impact of cognitive decline as a person grows older and can lead to healthy ageing.

See original article here.

As the working hours get longer and as communication scientific knowledge improves, folks are socially communicating less. We are just awfully busy to make new friends let alone construct authentically meaningful bond. At the end of the day, who needs face to face communication when you could do it in Twitter, Facebook and the numerous online talking services?

This seclusion trend is unfortunate at best because your brain, in addition to brain food, craves social interaction to function at its top. So critical is that it is on our health that a few specialist in the field believe that the amount of social interaction an individual had is one of the golden guide of health and independence in an individual’s old age.

How come social interactions so essential to a healthy brain?

Because your brain is able of neurogenesis (the procedure of developing brand new brain cells). Nevertheless neurogenesis results only when you sufficiently challenge your brain.

Well, communicating with other individual is one of the ultimate challenging task that an individual can take on. As Lawrence Katz once said, “There is a lot of evidences that another person is the ultimate in uncertain things you can encounter. So activities that have you communicating with another human beings is an awesome way of brain exercise.”

As you turn into more isolated, you are thus using less of your brain. As reported by Hebbian Learning principles, you lost what you don’t use. Thus brain cells die off and synapses breaks down as you grow older.

Unfortunately, people who are older also tend to live a more lonely life – thus starting a vicious cycle of mental decline. Sure, making new friends can be challenging and as any worthwhile relationships, you require plentiful energy to make it extraordinary.

Rest of article here.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but scientific findings seem to indicate otherwise. Research shows that our brains literally rewire in response to new stimulation. And when it comes to computer use, Internet activity may stimulate and possibly improve brain function, according to scientists at UCLA.

“Technology may be changing our minds and changing the way we think,” said Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist speaking last month at the UCLA Technology & Aging Conference at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging, described results of research he and colleagues performed with volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half of the participants were familiar with how to search the Internet, and the other half were new to it. The participants engaged in Internet searching while simultaneously undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The MRI images clearly showed activity in the areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning — but only in the Web-savvy group. The inexperienced group showed no such activity.

However, after just five one-hour sessions of practice, the Web newbies showed activation in the same areas of the brain as the savvy group.

“Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” said Small, writing about the findings in “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind” (HarperCollins). “Recent studies demonstrate that older brains do remain malleable and plastic throughout life. Even areas of the brain that were reserved for specialized tasks can be recruited and retrained.”

In other words, “use it or lose it” applies to the brain. Indeed, Small notes, “Several studies have shown that exercising the brain with mental aerobics not only can improve cognitive performance scores but also may delay brain degeneration.”

Rest of the article here

Do your mental aerobics and brain games at Myfitbrain.

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.

Our brains are essentially massively parallel processing machines.  Even the simple activity of gazing out at the ocean in total bliss requires the coordination of millions of perceptual processes.  When it comes to large-scale goal directed attention or action, however, we struggle to do more than a single thing at once.  A paper published last month in Neuron looked into the brain activity associated with multitasking and attempted to understand why.

A research group at Vanderbilt led by Paul Dux studied the changes that occur when people learn to perform two different tasks–a visual-manual task and an auditory-vocal task–at the same time.  fMRI brain scanning revealed that no areas of the brain respond only when the two activities are undertaken together. In other words, there is no part of the brain explicitly devoted to handling multitasking.  The researchers did find, however, that many regions of the brain were involved in these tasks but that only one, the left inferior frontal junction (IFJ), was more active when they were performed together.

The subjects in this experiment initially found it very difficult to multitask, but they got better with training.  The researchers thus looked at what was happening in the IFJ when these improvements were made to understanding how multitasking works in neural tissue.  They considered three separate hypotheses, each of which made different claims about the neural response to multitasking training.

In the first story, we get better at multitasking because the processing moves away from the slow abstraction of the prefrontal cortex to direct inflexible circuits linking sensory and motor areas.  To test this theory, the researchers looked at the effective connectivity between the regions involved in this task.  Even with training, however, there was no strengthening in the direct circuits between perception and response.  The information was still passing through the IFJ, it was just doing so more quickly.

A second hypothesis, then, was that dedicated circuits formed within the IFJ to segment and accelerate multitasking processes.  Dux and his colleagues performed a pattern classification analysis to evaluate this theory.  Pattern classification works by teaching a computer algorithm to discriminate between the brain response associated with different activities.  According the this second theory, classification performance should improve if the IFJ develops dedicated pipelines to handle the individual requirements of the multitasking procedure.

In fact, however, classification performance slightly decreased with training, indicating that the second hypothesis was also false.  This result does suggest, though, that there were some sort of changes within the IFJ, so the researchers turned to the third hypothesis.  They scanned several additional subjects using high temporal resolution fMRI focused just within the IFJ both before and after multitasking training.

With this new fine-grained data, the researchers were able to reach the conclusion that training leads to gains of efficiency in the central processing module within the IFJ.  The degree of improvement in reaction time corresponded to the acceleration in IFJ processing as revealed by fMRI. This shows that, even though the brain is massively parallel, complicated behaviors must  pass through this bottleneck before they can be executed.

Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. “Brain fitness” products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There’s even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.

But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.

Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has similar cognitive benefits, with the added benefit of actually being quite enjoyable to its participants. Together with Graham Staines, in 2004 they developed a controlled study to test their idea. They recruited 124 older adults, age 60 to 86, to participate in one of three study groups, by posting notices in senior centers in DuPage County, Illinois, offering a chance to participate in “arts training”:

Ah, but which art? Will you be learning about painting landscapes, playing the oboe, reciting Shakespeare, or writing verse? Only those who sign up will find out.

After everyone agreed they could attend all nine 90-minute sessions over the course of a month, one group was assigned to participate in a theater workshop, one group studied visual art, and one group received no training at all. Each group took a variety of cognitive tests at the beginning and end of the month. Everyone was paid $50 after completing the study.

The theater group improved significantly more compared to the control group in each of the measures (there was much less variance in the psychological well-being scores than in the other tests, so those small gains are significant). For problem solving and well-being, the theater group also improved significantly more than the visual arts group. The theater group also had the lowest drop-out rate of any group: All theater participants attended all 9 sessions, while 8 of the 44 visual arts students dropped out, despite the fact that all participants said they enjoyed the sessions.

Noice et al. continued to study the theater students for four months after the study, and found their performance on all tests was maintained for the entire post-study period.

The team argues that their results demonstrate that theater training — even over a relatively short time period — can help prevent cognitive decline associated with aging. They even speculate on some of the reasons why it is effective: Theater, they claim, requires sustained attention to the task in a way that other activities do not. Actors must stay in character for the duration of a scene, unlike studying visual art, where viewers might “rest” in between viewing different images. Also, the participants consistently remarked that theater was “new” to them, and novelty appears to be a key component of brain fitness.

The team says it would like to try other types of training in the future to see if they can find similar effects. We’ve reported on a study conducted that same year which showed IQ gains in children who studied music compared to kids who studied drama or nothing at all. This suggests that musical theater might beat music or theater alone as a brain fitness product!

Here is the original article