By Pyc Fitness
©2004-2008
Ask anyone who's forgotten the name of a long-time co-worker, reread a paragraph four times before absorbing its content or hit the brakes too slowly to avert a fender-bender: When the mental strength and agility of youth start to slip, you want it back.
If a method of preserving or restoring that youthful mental vigour were safe, inexpensive and as simple and diverting as playing a video game for a short while each day, you'd do it.
That is why mental fitness programs have become the latest frontier in the quest to age without conceding to infirmity.
The programs vary in format and cost, including online programs that cost $10 per month, hand-held games that, in the United States, can cost $140 and software packages priced at about $400. Special touch-screen consoles designed for a community's use or specialized programs for people with conditions such as attention deficit can cost several thousand dollars.
In the past three years, these brainpower-boosting programs have proliferated, with names like MindFit, Happy Neuron, Brain Fitness and Lumosity. Their market: boomers trying to tune up the brain, strengthen the memory and forestall or reverse the cognitive slippage that often comes with age, psychiatric disease, stroke or medical treatments.
But when an industry springs up so quickly and makes claims so sweeping and seductive, you'd be wise to ask for evidence and expect hype.
"There is plausibility, both biological and behavioural, to the claim that these may work," says Molly Wagster, chief of the U.S. National Institute on Aging's neuropsychology branch.
"But it is still a situation of buyer beware."
Physicians and scientists used to believe that declining mental performance was an immutable fact of aging and brain cells lost with age and wear-and-tear could not be replaced.
But the past 15 years have brought about a revolution in thinking about the brain not only its ability to generate replacement cells but to respond at any age to a stimulating environment by strengthening and developing new connections between cells and among different regions of the brain.
The bulk of this evidence is based on experiments done on animals. In recent years, human studies, too, have begun to link mental stimulation across the lifespan with better mental performance in old age an effect that appears powerful enough to delay the symptoms even of a devastating brain disease like Alzheimer's.
But is this neural "plasticity" happening in humans? Do training programs effect changes in the human brain? Will someone who improves his or her performance on a formal brain fitness program see improvements in everyday function?
The answers to these crucial questions remain unclear.
"There is no consistent and compelling body of evidence at this time" that demonstrates the value of brain-fitness programs in humans, says Elkhonon Goldberg, a New York University School of Medicine neuroscientist.
"But this is not to suggest such evidence cannot be attained. It's just a matter of conducting appropriate studies."
Goldberg provides scientific advice on sharpbrains.com, a website that tracks the business and science of brain-training. As neuroscientists use imaging technologies to "see" the cellular changes that come with learning, he says he grows more confident that well-designed training programs can have discernible effects in preserving or repairing the intellectual function of older adults.
"This is shared hardware" that's being changed in the brain, "and to the extent you somehow enhance it, that will have wide-ranging effects," Goldberg says. "It provides a much more compelling raison d'κtre for this whole business."
Some U.S. insurance companies have begun to distribute software programs such as Posit Science's Brain Fitness 2.0 to millions of their older customers. In two years, Nintendo's Brain Age, a video game designed to be played on a hand-held game device, has sold 10 million copies worldwide. Retirement communities are rushing to establish brain gyms to help current residents sharpen their mental skills and to attract future residents baby boomers, who one day might put such amenities on a par with a weight room and a track.
Do some brain-training exercises have lasting effects on those who use them, particularly the elderly? So far, there is little scientific evidence.
In the past year, a six-city clinical trial of cognitive training for people older than 65 offered limited evidence that brain training even when it occurs briefly and later in life can help people cope better. The study compared subjects given no access to mental training sessions and those who attended 10 sessions designed to sharpen inductive reasoning, looked at the ability to manage the daily tasks of independent living five years later.
Those who received training for memory and speed of mental processing did a little better than the untrained, especially when they got eight sessions of booster training at roughly one and three years after the initial training.
In another trial using Posit Science's $450 Brain Fitness program and sponsored by the company a group of subjects with an average age of 71 went through the eight-week program. The subjects showed marked improvements in memory overall compared with a group that had not received the training, Posit Science said.
Neuroscientist Henry Mahncke, Posit Science's chief scientific officer, says that if the notion of brain fitness is to take hold and the market is to grow companies will have to establish their scientific credibility by conducting clinical trials with their products.
"This is a fast-moving field," Mahncke says.
And companies some with the participation of neuroscientists, some without are making sweeping claims that are "just so much hot air" until they have been demonstrated in well-run studies.
In the meantime, customers are paying their money and taking their chances, on the argument that some organized program of mental stimulation even imperfect is better than enduring the slippage of mental acuity without a fight.
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