Brain fitness

Dec 2nd, 2009 | By
(This is actually an ad for the ad agency Drive Communications, but it works better here.)

(This jump rope is actu­ally an ad for the ad agency Drive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, but it works bet­ter here.)

In a recent newslet­ter from Posit Sci­ence, a com­pany that spe­cial­izes in brain fit­ness, there is an inter­est­ing report about how exer­cis­ing ones mind can improve people’s qual­ity of life while aging. It is writ­ten by Lau­rie Orlov, from Aging in Place Tech­nol­ogy Watch.

She refers to sev­eral stud­ies that show how mature adults can train their brains to age bet­ter, enabling them to keep liv­ing at home. You can down­load the report as a pdf file by click­ing here. The con­clu­sion is the best part:

While five years ago, the lit­er­a­ture indi­cated that cog­ni­tive train­ing largely allowed peo­ple to improve at the task trained, newly pub­lished arti­cles (…) clearly indi­cate that cer­tain brain fit­ness train­ing has ben­e­fits that extend beyond the task trained to gen­er­al­ized mea­sures of mem­ory and atten­tion, every day activ­i­ties and qual­ity of life. Those every­day activ­i­ties are the basis by which we will pre­serve our most cher­ished capa­bil­ity, our abil­ity to be inde­pen­dent and main­tain con­trol over our lives.

In other words, there’s no bet­ter time to head over to our Fit­ness page.

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  • http://www.positscience.com steve­naldrich

    Laurie’s report went in depth on the impor­tance of chal­leng­ing your brain as part of a holis­tic approach to stay­ing men­tally sharp that includes eat­ing a healthy diet, get­ting phys­i­cal exer­cise, and stay­ing emo­tion­ally and socially engaged.

    There is now a broad body of evi­dence that chal­leng­ing your brain re-​​wires your neu­rons and with the right chal­lenge you can speed up and make more accu­rate your brain’s responses. The research also shows that mem­ory (read the IMPACT study here http://www.scribd.com/doc/17888028/Smith-2009-I…) and a num­ber of other real-​​world mea­sures (read http://bit.ly/JAMA_Paper for a paper in the Jour­nal of Amer­i­can Med­i­cine) also improve just like phys­i­cal fit­ness gets bet­ter with exer­cise. And every­one is capa­ble of improv­ing. So whether you want to improve your abil­ity to improve reac­tion time on the ten­nis court, stop faster to avoid a crash caused by a dis­tracted dri­ver, or remem­ber new friends’ names, you can do it. The next step is to take action.

    Posit Sci­ence, where I am CEO and Dr. Mike Merzenich is Chief Sci­ence Offi­cer, makes scientifically-​​validated and engag­ing soft­ware that can help you think faster, focus bet­ter and remem­ber more. Over 30 clin­i­cal stud­ies from insti­tu­tions like the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hop­kins show that our tech­nol­ogy can have a range of ben­e­fits from improved mem­ory to low­ered health care costs to improved dri­ving safety. For more infor­ma­tion and to try free exer­cises, please visit http://www.positscience.com

  • http://www.positscience.com steve­naldrich

    Laurie’s report went in depth on the impor­tance of chal­leng­ing your brain as part of a holis­tic approach to stay­ing men­tally sharp that includes eat­ing a healthy diet, get­ting phys­i­cal exer­cise, and stay­ing emo­tion­ally and socially engaged.

    There is now a broad body of evi­dence that chal­leng­ing your brain re-​​wires your neu­rons and with the right chal­lenge you can speed up and make more accu­rate your brain’s responses. The research also shows that mem­ory (read the IMPACT study here http://www.scribd.com/doc/17888028/Smith-2009-I…) and a num­ber of other real-​​world mea­sures (read http://bit.ly/JAMA_Paper for a paper in the Jour­nal of Amer­i­can Med­i­cine) also improve just like phys­i­cal fit­ness gets bet­ter with exer­cise. And every­one is capa­ble of improv­ing. So whether you want to improve your abil­ity to improve reac­tion time on the ten­nis court, stop faster to avoid a crash caused by a dis­tracted dri­ver, or remem­ber new friends’ names, you can do it. The next step is to take action.

    Posit Sci­ence, where I am CEO and Dr. Mike Merzenich is Chief Sci­ence Offi­cer, makes scientifically-​​validated and engag­ing soft­ware that can help you think faster, focus bet­ter and remem­ber more. Over 30 clin­i­cal stud­ies from insti­tu­tions like the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hop­kins show that our tech­nol­ogy can have a range of ben­e­fits from improved mem­ory to low­ered health care costs to improved dri­ving safety. For more infor­ma­tion and to try free exer­cises, please visit http://www.positscience.com