If you are over 25, your brain is atrophying unless you are pushing it to its max.  Read this article to see several ways to keep your brain optimized.

We spend hours at the gym, eat right and go for our annual physicals and eye exams. But the most important organ in our bodies is often the most neglected, says cognitive fitness expert Rebecca Shafir.

Keeping the brain fit, she says, is critical for people’s long-term health.

“You have to use it or loose it,” Shafir, author of “The Zen of Listening,” says of the brain. “As brains age, there is atrophy just like muscles and it slows as it becomes more dormant.”

Shafir, a speech and language pathologist and neurotherapist at Harborside Counseling Services in Newburyport, provides brain fitness training for baby boomers over 50 and seniors who want to preserve and advance their cognitive skills. She also works with adolescents and adults with attention deficit disorder, head injury and stroke.

While physical activity is a good thing, Shafir says, brain exercises are important as well. By practicing a few simple exercises each day, she says people can stave off some of the effects of brain aging, improve their memory and be able to recall items more quickly and precisely.

Video games have been blamed for everything from causing aggression to giving you square eyes and a soft brain.

But what if video games are good for you?

Physio and occupational therapists started using simple video games in the late 1980s to treat people with a whole range of conditions from physical, learning or emotional disorders to cognitive problems following stroke and brain injury.

Today, a growing area of brain research suggests modern fast-paced action video games — in particular first-person shooter games — may sharpen your vision, improve your attention and working memory, and develop your fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

What’s more, these skills aren’t just virtual: they can help you do better in real-life situations, like driving your car or juggling more than one task at a time.

So what is it about blasting away your virtual enemies that’s so good for your head?

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Research since the 90s shows that individuals who lead mentally stimulating lives, through their education, their jobs, and also their hobbies, build a “Cognitive Reserve” in their brains. Stimulating the brain can literally generate new neurons and strengthen their connections which results in better brain performance and in having a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms.
As astounding as these insights may be, most Americans still devote more time to changing the oil, taking a car to a mechanic, or washing it, than thinking about how to maintain, if not improve, their brain performance. Not enough young and middle-aged people are benefiting from this emerging research, since it has been perceived as something “for seniors.” Granted, there are still many unknowns in the world of brain fitness and cognitive training. We need more research, better assessments and tools. But, this does not mean we cannot start caring for our brains today.
Inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity. James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany, notes that only 6 per cent of how long you’ll live, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ longevity; by contrast, up to 90 per cent of how tall you are, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ height. Even genetically identical twins vary widely in life span: the typical gap is more than fifteen years.
This is why brain maintenance is too important: to make sure our brains last as long as the rest of our bodies.

Read rest of the article here.

We have just added two new fun mental fitness games to Myfitbrain to continue working on more of your cognitive skills.  We are almost complete in the 7 cognitive areas with only language still remaining.  It has been tough to find games that are fun, unique, and supported by research.  If you have any suggestion, please leave a comment.

The first brain game is Spot n Shop.  It is a game that requires you to pay attention to different areas of the screen while you play.  You are presented with a shopping aisle in a store.  You are shown a product and an random aisle number.  You have to remember the aisle number and the location of the product.  As the game’s difficulty level increases, the product gets smaller and the time on screen will get shorter.  The research calls this game a UFOV (Useful Field Of View) game.  One insurance has actually demonstrated how a similar game decreased driving accidents by playing a UFOV brain game.

The second new cognitive game is Matching Chirps.  This is an auditory game where you need to remember chirps that the birds make.  The game starts out pretty easy where you only have to match if the two sounds in a row are identical.  After you get used to that, you have to begin remembering what the prior sound was, or 1 back.  As the game increases in difficulty, you have to remember 2 back etc…  This is brain game based around some research done for improving working memory called N-back cognitive games.  There are even more difficult one based around dual N-back where multiple things change.  For now this looked difficult enough for most people.

I hope you enjoy the games.  If you think we need to change something, please add a comment so we can improve the games for you.

Jim Hanekamp

Glenview, IL (PRWEB) April 10, 2009 — Myfitbrain announces the release of its innovative brain training software at no charge to users due to its unique advertising model. Myfitbrain, started with the premise of allowing everyone to benefit from fun software that stimulated the mind. In order for that to be possible, Myfitbrain came up with a new advertising model which allows advertisers to dynamically load products into the game pieces, significantly increasing product recognition when compared to traditional advertising methods.

Myfitbrain includes multiple types of mental fitness games focusing on different parts of the brain to sharpen the overall brain and encourage the generation new brain cells. While some consumers exclusively enjoy games such as Sudoku or crossword puzzles which stimulates some areas of the brain, stimulating many cognitive areas of the brain is significantly more beneficial. The learning management system built into Myfitbrain will maintain a player’s performance and drive them through the different games while challenging different cognitive abilities.

Read more about us, by clicking the following link: MyFitBrain

Jim Hanekamp of Glenview creates health-based gaming site
By: Jessica Cantarelli/Triblocal.com staff reporter

For Glenview resident Jim Hanekamp, a sharp memory is priceless. However, with his newest endeavor, he hopes to help people improve brain function at no cost to them at all.

Jim Hanekamp Founder of Myfitbrain

Hanekamp is the founder and CEO of MyFitBrain.com, a newly-launched Web site that uses cognitive games to improve brain function and memory.

Hanekamp grew up in Northbrook, and graduated from Glenbrook North High School. He attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1977 with a Bachelor’s Degree in biology.  He started out working with his father, who owned Hanekamp Funeral Home in Northbrook, and also as a paramedic, before moving into the technology-world.

He began working for companies like Montgomery Ward, Kraft Foods and Allstate Insurance. While CIO at Schawk Incorporated in Des Plaines, he also served as president of a small software division. The father of five lives in Glenview with his new wife Pat.

“My jobs have always been tech-related, I’ve always thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” he said. “I’ve always changed what I’ve done. To me, this is the ultimate change—this is my first time running and starting up a company to make a difference in people’s lives.”

The idea for MyFitBrain.com came to Hanekamp when one of his close family members began showing signs of Alzheimer’s. After researching, the idea for Web-based cognitive games sparked his interest.

But, it wasn’t until last summer when he was watching a television special about similar games that cost users up to $400, that he figured out what he was going to do.  Hanekamp said he thought that was too much money to pay and a lot of people wouldn’t be able to afford it.

“I wanted to be able to offer a free way for people to play cognitive games and improve their brains and push out the natural effects of aging,” he said. “MyFitBrain.com is a game portal that has challenging games in seven categories. Players can push their brains in different directions and build new neurons and receptors so it uses a bigger mass of the brain cells and the effects of aging are delayed.”

Hanekamp began outsourcing the development to different countries like India. Robin Alter, CTO and CoFounder of Kreeda Games India served as the Web developer for the site. Alter said the games have been intentionally simplified to be more accessible to an older audience.

“The real magic in the MyFitBrain.com solution is in the ability to dynamically adjust the difficulty levels of the games as they adapt to each individual’s abilities and to track their progress,” Alter said. “During development, we focused more on the learning qualities of the games and the positive effects they can have.”

The site launched on April 1, and featured four of the eventual seven games. Each of the current six games have general rules of play. There are time limits for each game because this is dependent on the complexity of the level and the game. There are up to 30 levels of difficulty for each game.

Each of the games serves a different purpose to challenge a player’s brain. Pair ‘Em Up is a traditional memory game; Spot ‘N Shop is a visualization game; Matching Chirps is an audible game; Calorie Challenge is a mathematical game; Code Breaker is a logic game; and Beat the Gates is a reflex game.

“As people go through life they fall into habits, like doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles every day, or going to work the same way every day,” Hanekamp said. “Your brain becomes trained to these things and stops maximizing its growth.  It is important to continuously push your brain in new ways.  When you do this, your brain will actually build up a cognitive reserve of more brain cells.  Then, if something negatively impacts your brain, like an injury or simple effects of aging, you are less likely to show the effects.  For a normal person, the goal is to improve all of their cognitive skills and delay the natural effects of aging.”

Though MyFitBrain.com has been up and running since April 1, Hanekamp said that is half the battle. He still has much work to do. He hopes to expand the site’s use and gear it toward school children as well as incorporate advertiser’s products into the games.

“In order to make sure the site is free to use, I have put my advertising infrastructure into the interactive part of the game play,” he said. “It’s a very unique ad model and what it does is incorporates products from companies into the game. By integrating products it’s gets away from normal banner ads, which are becoming less effective over time. What I really want to do is integrate the products so players will be saying the product names — that’s better for the advertisers.”

As far as challenges from starting up a Web company, he said the hard part hasn’t been developing and funding his start-up site, it’s been getting the word out.

“It’s a unique time in history to start a company and draw resources from around the world,” he said. “There are financial and economic struggles I’m dealing with. But this has helped me to do a lot of networking and find out there are people willing to help. Everything always takes longer than you hoped and planned.”

Hanekamp said he hopes the site will speak for itself to potential users and advertisers.

“Cognitive health or natural effects of aging can degrade slowly and you can come to accept it as just part of one’s personality,” he said. “If we wait too long before we begin working our brains in many areas, it can be too late and drugs are then required. If you begin building your cognitive reserve early, then you can push out when these effects become noticeable.”

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In September of 2008, Haile Gebrselassie set a new world record for the marathon of 2 hours 3 minutes and 59 seconds; he improved on his own previous world best by 27 seconds. An amazing achievement. Between 1952 and 1954, James Peters of the United Kingdom set no less than four world best marathon times reducing his time by more than 3 minutes. But his best time of 2 hours 17 minutes and 40 seconds in 1954 would have left him trailing Gebrselassie by almost three miles. This doesn’t detract from Peters’ considerable achievements in distance running, but it does indicate how much more we know today about the ways and means of physical training and conditioning.

In much the same way, we’re now beginning to see serious attention given to brain training as a mechanism for reaching and maintaining optimal mental condition. As the data from academic research and field studies mounts, it becomes clear that brain training can provide a broad range of benefits – providing worthwhile results in everything from senior brain health to childhood education.
To read about the different types of brain training this article confronts, follow the link: Brain Training Benefits