Brilliant Blog

Neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center (see our previous interview with Yaakov Stern on the Cognitive Reserve) have asked for help in recruiting volunteers for an exciting clinical trial. If you are based in New York City, and between the ages of 60 and 75, please consider joining this study.

More information below:

---------------------------

Use it or Lose it?

Train your Brain! Healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 75 living in NYC are invited to join a study of mental fitness training. Qualified individuals will play a scientifically-based video game in our laboratory, and will be tested to determine the effects on attention, memory, and cognitive performance.

You will earn up to $600 plus transportation costs if you complete the 3-month program.

This exciting study is being performed by the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center at Columbia University Medical Center.

If interested, contact us today:

Study hotline: (212) 342-1729

Email: brainaging (at) columbia (dot) edu

Study details:

- Institutional Review Board (CPMC IRB)

- IRB# AAAC6151.   Approval Date: 10/30/07.  Expiration Date: 07/31/08.

- Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center

---------------------------

Other researchers: we will soon be opening a new page in our Resources section listing clinical trials related to cognitive health and training. Email us if you want to make sure we list yours: information (at) sharpbrains (dot) com with Clinical Trials in the subject line.

The most popular question we got when we announced that PBS had a great special on Brain Fitness Program and Neuroplasticity in December was, when will the DVD be available?

Well, finally here it comes. You can click on the image or the title to go over to PBS shop to learn more and buy it.

The Brain Fitness Program DVD ($24.95, shipped by 02/01/08). "This program presents a workout to help viewers get their brains in better shape. The Brain Fitness Program is based on neuro-plasticity, the ability of the brain to change and adapt — even rewire itself. In the past two years, a team of scientists has developed computer-based stimulus sets that drive beneficial chemical, physical and functional changes in the brain. Dr. Michael Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco and his colleagues around the world have been leading this effort; he brings the research findings, along with a scientifically based set of brain exercises, to PBS viewers in this innovative and life-altering program. Peter Coyote narrates. "

You can watch a 3-minute trailer: click here.

Related blog posts

- Brain Fitness Newsletter: December Edition: a collection of articles and links including news, resources, brain teasers, and more.

- Neuroplasticity 101 and Brain Fitness Glossary: an overview of the emerging science and some key concepts to understand it.

- Brain Training Games and "Games": a 10-Question Checklist on how to evaluate programs that make brain-related claims.

- Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology Interview Series: in-depth interviews with scientists and experts in cognitive training and brain fitness.

- Books on neuroplasticity and memory training: reviews of Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind, by Sharon Begley, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. Both books are fascinating and powerful; each would have merited appearing in the 2007 New York Times List of 100 Notable Books.

Special Offer: For a limited time, you can receive a complimentary copy of our Brain Fitness 101 e-Guide: Answers to your Top 25 Questions, written by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg and Alvaro Fernandez, by subscribing to our monthly newsletter. You can subscribe Here.

You can now check the last edition of Grand Rounds blog carnival. Grand Rounds brings, weekly, the best blog posts on health and medical issues.

We will host the next edition in our blog, on Tuesday January 15th.

Theme of the edition: Briefing The Next US President. You can choose to write about some issue very close to your heart, that you'd like to make sure the next US President pays attention to. Or simply send us your best post this week: I will include all the good posts I receive, to provide a window into what health and medicine professionals are thinking of in a typical week.

Send submissions to afernandez at gmail dot com, with Grand Rounds in the subject line.

Looking forward your submissions!

Dr. Robert Sylwester is an educator of educators, having received multiple awards during his long career as a master communicator of the implications of brain science research for education and learning. He is the author of several books and many journal articles, and member of our Scientific Advisory Board. His most recent book is The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (Corwin Press, 2007). He is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon.

I am honored to interview him today.

Alvaro Fernandez: Let's start with that eternal source of debate. What do we know about the respective roles of genes and our environment in brain development?

Robert Sylwester: Genetic and environmental factors both contribute to brain maturation. Genetics probably play a stronger role in the early years, and the environment plays a stronger role in later years. Still the mother's (environmental) use of drugs during the pregnancy could affect the genetics of fetal brain development, and some adult illnesses, such as Huntington's Disease, are genetically triggered.

Nature and nurture both require the significant contributions of the other in most developmental and maintenance functions. We typically think of environmental factors as things that happen to us, over which we have little control.

Can't our own decisions have an effect in our own brain development? For example, what if I choose a career in investment banking, vs. one in journalism or teaching?

We make our own career decisions in life, and most of us make a combination of good and bad decisions, which influence our brain's maturation.

My father was very unusual in his career trajectory in that he worked at one place throughout his entire adult life, and died three months after he retired at 91. I've always thought that it's a good idea to make a change every ten years or so and do something different – either within the same organization or to move to another one.

It's just as good for organizations to have some staff turnover as it is for staff to move to new challenges. The time to leave one position for another is while you and your employer are still happy with what you're doing. You'll take what you learned in your prior job to your new job, and you'll add competencies from your new job that you otherwise wouldn't have developed.

I find that, in an emerging field like cognitive science, we need to start by clarifying the language we use. Can you define some words such as Learning, Education, Brain Development and Cognition.

Sure.

LEARNING: Most organisms begin life with most or all of the processing systems and information that they need to survive. Humans are a notable exception in that an adult-size brain is significantly larger than a mother's birth canal, so we're born with an immature one pound brain that develops additional mass and capabilities during its 20 year post-birth developmental trajectory. Parenting, mentoring, teaching, and mass media are examples of the cultural systems that humans have developed to help young people master the knowledge and skills they need to survive and thrive in complex environments. Learning is one the main activities we do, even if we often are not aware of it.

EDUCATION: Education, like the culture it subsumes, is a conservative phenomenon. Science and technology move rapidly, but education doesn't. So if schools often resemble the schools of 50 years ago, that should not be surprising. Parents remember their school experiences, and since they survived them, they are typically leery about educators experimenting with their children. This explains in part why schools have not incorporated many of the recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

BRAIN DEVELOPMENT: Childhood brain development is focused on systems that allow children to recognize and remember the dynamics of environmental challenges – challenges that protective adults will solve for them. Adolescent brain development is more focused on frontal lobe development, the systems that allow us to respond appropriately and autonomously to the challenges we confront.

COGNITION: Every experience will alter our brain's organization at some level, so our brain's processing networks continually change throughout our life. This process is called brain plasticity. For example, since my brain has adapted to my switch from a typewriter to a computer, it would now be difficult (but not impossible) for me to write again on a typewriter. Now, cognition is linked to other concepts: emotion is the processing system that tells us how important something is; attention focuses us on the important and away from the unimportant things; problem-solving determines how to respond, partly on the basis of our memory of prior related experiences; and behavior carries out the decision. The general term cognition encompasses these various processes.

You recently published a book titled The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (2007. Corwin Press). What advice would you give to parents and educators of adolescents?

Biological phenomena always operate within ranges. For example, leaves fall from trees in the autumn, but typically not all at once. Developmental changes similarly do not occur at the same time and at the same rate in all child and adolescent brains. And just as it's possible for wind or temperature to alter the time when a leaf might fall, unexpected events can alter the time when an adolescent has to confront and respond to given environmental challenges.

The important thing for adults to do is to carefully observe an adolescent's interests and abilities, and insert challenges that move maturation forward at a reasonable level. If you push too fast, you end up with a stressed out adolescent. If you do not challenge sufficiently, you end up with a bored adolescent. No magic formula exists for getting this just right. This means, for example, that we celebrate the skills of artists and athletes who function beyond typical human capacity, and we create judicial sanctions for those whose behavior does not reach culturally acceptable levels. Most human behavior is personally chosen and executed within wide ranges. We can easily observe this wide range in such phenomena as political discourse and religious belief or practice. Adolescents strive towards autonomous adulthood as they gradually discover their interests and capabilities, and what is biologically possible and culturally appropriate. They adapt their life to wherever they're most comfortable within the marvelous sets of possible and appropriate ranges that exist.

Adolescents take risks, no doubt about that. If you want to eventually function within any range, you have to locate its outer positive and negative limits. Speed limits and other regulations provide direction, but adolescents (and adults) still tend to move towards the limits – and maybe just a smidgen beyond. Bad things can then occur. Part of learning, that each person needs to learn to self-regulate.

In short, parents and educators need to pay attention to observe where adolescent's interests and abilities lie, and engage them with experiences that will enable them to move forward. Theorists, such as Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and David Perkins have proposed that intelligence involves multiple components, and can't be reduced to a single point on a numerical scale, as I.Q. attempts to do.

Education is still a field with many competing, fragmented, approaches. A typical tension is between movements that advocate focusing on intellectual strengths, vs. those that advocate training and shoring up weaknesses, or bottlenecks. What is your take?

The answer is probably both-- but do let me know when you've figured out the correct balance in that issue, and I'll contact the folks in Stockholm who give out the Nobel Prizes.

I take good note of that offer...what are the most exciting areas of brain research, and what are some resources for educators to learn about brain and refine teaching? Websites, books?

The cognitive neurosciences are currently so dynamic. It seems that an exciting new development occurs every day, and many of these new developments are reported in the mass media.

I write a monthly non-technical column on educationally significant developments in the cognitive neurosciences for the Internet journal Brain Connection. All 90 of my earlier columns are archived within the following link, so many questions of readers have probably been explored in previous columns: here.

Sharpbrains.com is another great resource. Both websites will link folks to other useful websites.

In terms of books, I always think an author’s most recent book is the best one to read, since it incorporates new developments that have occurred since earlier books were published. For example, I'm now reading Steven Pinker's intriguing new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007, Viking). It's the fifth in 14 years in his series of books for general readers, and I've benefitted from each, and from their cumulative effect. As indicated above, my most recent book is The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy. I'm currently working on a companion book, A Child's Brain: The Need for Nurture, which Corwin Press will publish in 2009.

One nice thing about committing to write a book is that I now have to stay alive or at least lucid for another year or so.

And you will be both. Robert, many thanks for your time, and see you in San Francisco next month.

Same. Always a pleasure to talk.

--------------------------

Announcements: both Robert Sylwester and Alvaro Fernandez will be presenting at the upcoming Learning & The Brain Conference. You can learn more about the conference, and the special discount for SharpBrains' readers, clicking here.

You may enjoy some of our previous interviews in our Neuroscience Interview Series:

- James Zull on the Art of Changing The Brain.

- Elkhonon Goldberg on Cognitive Training.

- Yaakov Stern on Lifelong Learning and building a Cognitive Reserve.

Finally, a reminder that we just released a Whitepaper titled 10 Brain Fitness Myths Debunked, based on the interview series: here.

We have suggested before (The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains)...

"Don't Outsource Your Brain. Not to media personalities, not to politicians, not to your smart neighbour... Make your own decisions, and mistakes. And learn from them. That way, you are training your brain, not your neighbour's."

Well, let me add now: Don't Outsource Your Brain to Your GPS system, either...

Read article: here (via Drudge)

- "A 32-year-old Californian whose rental car got smashed by a Metro-North train last night was issued a minor summons for causing the fiery crash that stranded railroad commuters for hours."

- "Bo Bai, a computer technician from Sunnyvale who said he was merely trusting his car's global positioning system when he steered onto the tracks, was cited for obstructing a railroad crossing, officials said this afternoon."

Fortunately, the driver was safe, and there were no injuries. The article deserves reading...here.

Some very interesting brain fitness software market news:

1) Scientific Learning To Buy Out Soliloquy

- "Scientific Learning Corp. has announced that it will acquire Soliloquy Learning from JTT Holdings. Both Scientific Learning and Soliloquy provide technology solutions for education. The acquisition will cost SLC about $11 million and is expected to be completed this month."

- "Scientific Learning is the developer of Fast ForWord, a family of reading intervention tools targeted toward students who are characterized as struggling learners and designed to develop the required "neurocognitive skills" for reading and learning in general. Soliloquy is also a reading intervention developer."

Comment: this acquisition consolidates Scientific Learning (NSDQ: SCIL) as the leading company in the education segment of the brain fitness market. It will be interesting to track what research gets done on the neural and cognitive effects of Soliloquy, since Scientific Learning's Fast Forword is backed by extensive literature.

2) Technomedia Partners With SBT to Accelerate Its International Expansion

- "Technomedia, a Canadian provider of talent management and human capital development solutions, announced its partnership with the SBT (Scientific Brain Training) group, a European provider of training and evaluation of cognitive functions."

Comment: this acquisition provides SBT an entry point into the North America HR services market, positioning it well for the expected growth in the HR & corporate training market focused on cognitive services.

3) The Brain's Role in Trading Performance

- "Dr. Goldberg, co-author of the aforementioned chapter, suggests that engaging in tasks that require use of the frontal lobes may in fact strength their function. This has profound implications for the treatment of dementia and attention deficits and may also play an important role in improving performance at such cognitive tasks as trading. "

- "Interestingly, the research cited in Dr. Goldberg's chapter indicates that the prefrontal cortex is most involved in tasks that involve novelty. Familiar tasks that are routine do not require the same kind of attention, concentration, planning, and judgment. It may well be that tackling new, unfamiliar challenges is most stimulating to brain development, whereas routine (consider the lifestyles of many retired people) is least likely to enhance cognitive functioning."

Comment: sound advice by Brett Steenbarger, a leading trading psychology expert. Indeed, there is no need to wait until one has a medical problem to start nurturing our brains...and we are seeing high-demand occupations (military, professional sports, traders) adding new tools to their toolkits.