vibrantBrains: San Francisco Brain Gym

vibrantBrains, a gym to exercise our brains, has recently opened in San Francisco. We all buy into the health club idea for our bodies so why not one to tone our brains, too? The vibrantBrains folks have created a pleasant, bright space on Sacramento Street, close to cafes, shops, and residential areas. They have the front of the club filled with interesting books, including some bestsellers, by scientists and others on various aspects of brain research and how the brain works; the middle part of the club is filled with state-of-the-art computers with headphones nearby. A lounge area with comfy chairs and tea, coffee, and water always available fills the floor-to-ceiling windowed alcove at the back of the club and is a great place to chat with other members. They have developed Neurobics Circuit Training, which incorporates a number of scientifically based software programs that enable a club member to work on different skills for each visit or a variety of skills within a workout and at a huge discount over trying to find and purchase these programs individually. These games and exercises, based on hard science, emphasize different skills, such as memory, reasoning, visual scanning, word recall, and quantitative facility, or a combination of many of these skills at once. They also focus on increasing speed and accuracy, with practice.

Just as we need to lift weights to insure that are our muscles are strong enough to swim or dance, we also need to strengthen our speed and accuracy with memory, reasoning, and visual scanning skills to make sudoku or a crossword puzzle fun. Or to make a challenging book enjoyable to read.

For those who want to add more intensity (and hard science), vibrantBrains also makes other programs available at a discount to its members, including Dr. Gary Small's (from the UCLA Center for Aging) Memory Fitness Course and Posit Science's Brain Fitness Program.

The vibrantBrains innovative founders, Jan Zivic and Lisa Schoonerman, may just have latched onto a trend that Boomers and others must incorporate into our lives to keep that notion that "60 is the new 40" alive and well. And just to enjoy our lives more. They will also offer a speaker series soon as well as book clubs and other related activies.

I, along with most people I know, have figured out that I need a variety of exercises for my body, from aerobic ones like swimming and dancing, to weight training to flexibility training, such as yoga and Pilates, just to maintain. It's high time we added in specific exercises to tone the various everyday brain skills we need to maintain and even increase the quality of our lives. Better memory, reasoning, language, quantitative, and visual-spatial skills have to make living just more interesting and more fun.

In Search of Memory

In Search of Memory, the Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel, is not what I had in mind for summer reading. I was looking for a mystery when I wandered over to the nonfiction area of my little neighborhood bookstore. Kandel's book looked interesting, was highly portable in paperback, and a possible choice for my upcoming plane trip. I knew Eric Kandel was at Columbia and was a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the mind but that was about it.

I read a few pages, overcame my belief that this one could likely be dry as dust and bought it. It turns out that Mr. Kandel is quite a writer in addition to being a great scientist. He pulled me in immediately with his descriptions of his early life in Vienna and I never got out again. From there, I was whisked into his love affair with medicine and science and the mind, not to mention real people, like his wife and children. He intertwined his love of art, music, fine wines, and good friends with his fascination with the behavior of the aplysia's cells and the biology of memory. He also managed to sneak in a chronology of scientific research on cognition and the mind from its early beginnings until today and in an understandable, extremely interesting way.

He included a poem, written by his young daughter, titled (of course) "The Aplisa." "An aplisa is like a squishy snail. In rain in snow in sleet in hail. When it is angry, it shoots out ink. The ink is purple, not pink. An aplisa cannot live onland. It doesn't have feet so it can't stand. It has a very funny mouth, And in winter it goes to the south." Kandel was clearly obsessed and his family knew it. The rest of us on the planet should be thankful for his compulsive curiosity about what was happening in the cells of the aplysia. We are also fortunate that a number of other creative scientists were beginning to think about the mind differently than in the past at around the same time so they could build on each others' work. They were beginning to realize that so many of the mind's functions are controlled by the biology of the cell. Amazing that understanding the chemical reactions in the cells of one of earth's smallest organisms has enabled gigantic progress in our understanding of what we like to think is one of the most complicated organs on earth, the human brain.

For a magnificent review, please take a look at the Neurophilosophy blog. Better yet, read the book. A great story. A wonderful life.

NIA Study: Cognitive Skills Training Keeps Our Brains Sharp

Great news today from the ACTIVE (the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly) study, a large longitudinal study funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Nursing Research, both parts of the NIH. People who actively train on specific cognitive skills (in this case, memory, processing speed, and reasoning) experience long-term benefits that generalize into everyday living. The group who trained were much more likely to succeed at everyday tasks like driving, managing money, and general problem-solving than their peers who did not participate in these mental exercises. In other words, they kept their mental edge. The conclusion: "use it or lose it" really does apply to the brain, too, and cognitive training can make a big difference.

Heretofore, one of the researchers--Timothy Salthouse--has been very negative about cognitive skills training and has been quoted widely. He has questioned whether there is any worthwhile effect--short or long-term--or if cognitive training can generalize to real-life situations.

Today we got a very different and much more positive view of this important research. Kudos to everyone involved and especially to lead author Sherry L. Willis, PhD of Pennsylvania State University and her co-authors at six other affiliated institutions.

Brain Health: We're Starting to Test the Right Things

As the director of a longevity center at a respected research institution said to me recently, "We just haven't figured out what to test. We haven't been creative enough." She was referring to our discussion of what kinds of exercises really keep our brains fit. That seems to be changing.

Jonathan McNulty of the School of Medicine and Medical Science, University College, Dublin, has tried a different approach. And it works. His team found that simple yet intensive memorization followed by a rest period resulted in ". . . both metabolic changes in the brain and improved memory performance." The 55- to 70-year-old volunteers were given six weeks for intensive rote memorization tasks, such as memorizing a newspaper article or poetry, of 500 words. They then had six weeks of rest.

Here's the kicker: when tested immediately after the memorization work, there was no change in brain metabolism or memory performance. But after the six-week rest, all of the volunteers showed improvements in verbal and episodic memory (the ability to relate story or tell a joke).

This reminds me of a trick I've long used: if I have a problem I need to figure out, I assign my brain the task, usually before going to sleep, and forget about it. Typically, later (and sometimes immediately when I wake up the next morning), a solution or at least a way of thinking about the problem pops up (without being summoned) in my mind. Our brains clearly need some down time to work on their own without our conscious interference.

Recently, there have been several studies using the Stroop test. That's the one with color words written in a different color (the word blue written in yellow, for example) and you're asked to identify the color of the letters. The distraction of automatic reading of the word makes it challenging to identify the letter color. Several researchers have shown that intensive work on the Stroop test (or similar tests or games) can substantially improve driving skills. Why? Because driving requires concentration--the ability to override distractions and automatic responses and choose the required response.

To me, these studies test the right things and are beginning to prove that practice on cognitive process (fluid intelligence) is just as important as acquired knowledge (crystallized intelligence). It takes both to keep our mental edge.

Mother Was Right: Eat Your Vegetables (They're Good for Your Brain)

Martha Clare Morris, associate professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, has been observing the effects of diet on aging and the brain. She and her team have found that eating vegetables, especially green leafy ones, every day can make a big difference in the brains of those who crunched through kale, spinach, lettuce, chard, and other green leafies and those who didn't: faster thinking. Or, as she put it, the equivalent of being five years younger in age for the veggie-consumers.

The study involved six years of observation of 3,718 participants who were 65 and older and is part of the Chicago Health and Aging Project.

The reason? "Morris suspects that vegetables may help protect memory and thinking speed because they contain high amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant that can help reduce the damage caused by free radicals, unstable oxygen molecules generated by normal metabolism that can damage neurons in the brain and contribute to dementia." These research results were reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Neurology.

In another report issued by the AMA last year, Morris concluded that eating fish at least once a week increases brain fitness, too, equaling a brain-age three-to-four years younger. Fruit-eaters did not experience such brain-related benefits.

I think by now we all know that green leafy veggies and fish are good diet choices. We didn't know that they could make that much difference. Berkeley Professor of Integrative Biology, Marion Diamond, has been saying this for quite some time, however.

Technorati tags: cognition, brain, Alzheimer's, dementia, memory, brain fitness, diet

How to Get Really Good at Anything

It turns out all our teachers and coaches were right: experts in just about any field are made not born. The people who practice the most learn the most, according to a large amount of psychological evidence gathered together in Phillip E. Ross' "The Expert Mind," published in the August 2006 Scientific American.

But how do they do it? I've always joked that intuition is "compressed experience." I may be right. Some of the key questions involving "expert" minds have revolved around how information is stored in our brains and then retrieved. Those who work hard at becoming experts in a particular area see similar situations come up again and again, whether in chess, music, or I suppose, surgery. The brain begins to chunk the information and build templates to use later, if a similar situation arises again. When it does, our brains fall back on the templates but quickly, using short-term memory, customize our actions--and the template-- by making small changes where needed. This skill enables experts to quickly make correct decisions about chess moves, for example. And a pro tennis player's mind is likely to use the same mechanisms, when she anticipates where a ball may hit and is there ready for it. Ross notes that this "knowledge-guided perception" enables true experts to correctly guess what is likely to happens next and prepare for it. And these mental templates are built through repetition and experience, in other words: time put in on the task, enabling us to store information in long-term memory and customize it when we retreive it.

As Ross points out, there are many more experts and prodigies in many fields today than there were formerly, in great part due to using computers that provide many times more "experience" than humans can. Of course, intense motivation and the ability to focus deeply and immediately are also traits that experts have in common.

Ross leaves us with a compelling question: Instead of asking, "Why can't Johnny read?" we should be asking, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?" And I would add: at any age.


technorati: brain, mind,education, memory