Brain Training For Peak Mental Fitness
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In breaking the world record for the 100m sprint in Beijing, Usain Bolt completed the distance in 9.69 seconds. Not since Carl Lewis has a sprinter been this dominant and so far ahead of the field. Yet in 1984, Carl Lewis ran 0.3 seconds slower than Bolt in winning his gold medal - that would have put him about 3 meters back from Bolt. In fact, all but two of the eight finalists in Beijing would have beaten Carl Lewis. This doesn’t take anything away from Lewis. But it tells us how far we’ve come in understanding the kind of training required to reach optimal physical condition.
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.
Some recent examples:
Scottish Study: Computer games boost math scores
In a study of 600 Scottish children in 32 schools math scores increased by more than 50% for children who played a brain game for twenty minutes a day for just ten weeks.
New brain fitness program to fight memory loss
The Alzheimer’s Association of Australia has endorsed brain training as a way to maintain good brain health into later life. In randomized, controlled trials, program participants more than doubled their processing speed and had gains of more than 10 years in standardized measures of memory and attention.
Training Working Memory Increases Intelligence
A study published in April, 2008, is revolutionizing the way we think about intelligence. With thirty minutes of rigorous daily training in working-memory, scientists from the Universities of Michigan and Bern demonstrated increases in fluid intelligence of more than 40% in less than 20 days.
The Many Benefits of Brain Training
The brain training revolution has been spurred by the findings of neuroscientists that far from being hard-wired and doomed to slow decline, the brain can grow new cells and, under the right conditions, is remarkably plastic - capable of forming entirely new structures and maps. Everything we do, think and feel involves electrical signals between neurons, and the pathways these signals take is far less predictable and fixed than once thought.
Success in School & Higher Education
As the study of Scottish schoolchildren demonstrates, supplementing traditional study with brain training can help children get the most out of the time they spend at school, improving academic performance and making them better life-long learners. Teenagers taking standardized tests, or adults applying to graduate school, can now add brain training to their pre-test regimen. And whereas traditional test preparation only helps with the tests being taken, an appropriate brain training program can provide a broad increase in thinking ability that will carry across into the student’s eventual program of study.
While it’s become an accepted practice to help children with learning dysfunctions by providing workarounds or accommodations for a child’s particular weakness, some pioneering learning specialists (such as Barbara Arrowsmith Young, founder of the Arrowsmith School in Canada) have begun to tackle the dysfunctions head on with brain training. By targeting and strengthening the particular brain function that is underdeveloped, it is possible to reduce or eliminate the dysfunction altogether.
Work and Personal Growth
Many of those engaged in careers that demand creative problem-solving and focused mental activity can use brain training as a way to stay sharp and in peak mental form. Unfortunately, the demands of the workplace tend to produce poor conditions for brain improvement - competing demands for focus and attention, staples of the modern workplace - disrupt the brain’s ability to form memories and stimulate new cell growth. A brain training program that demands complete focus and trains core areas of cognitive function (working-memory, processing speed, and left-brain right-brain interaction) can make us significantly more effective and successful in the workplace.
Brain training can also bring about changes in areas that we would not initially imagine it could. Users of brain fitness programs regularly report improved self-esteem, improved hand-eye coordination and increased self perception. But since the brain directs all aspects of thinking and feeling these findings are perhaps not at all surprising. By incorporating brain training into our schedule of self-improvement activities we can derive considerable value and satisfaction from this new self-improvement tool.
Brain Maintenance and Mental Health
The UCSF Memory and Aging Center reports that for each decade past the age of forty-five we lose about 10% of our cognitive capacity. Joe Verghese, M.D. (New England Journal of Medicine, volume=348, issue=25, 2003) found that people can reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms by 64% by adding a brain exercise to their weekly schedule. He also showed that people who engage in brain exercise four times a week have a 47% lower risk of dementia than those who do so just once a week. Senior centers around the country have begun to introduce brain training programs. But clearly if we want to avoid mental decline we should begin to engage in regular mental exercise much sooner, while we’re in our thirties or early forties.
And as if these weren’t sufficient reasons to run out and invest in a good brain training tool, scientists have also linked new cell growth with the efficacy of antidepressants and reduction in the stress that can lead to depression. Brain training then also promises the ideal conditions to help counter and mitigate depression.
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