Brain Exercises: Better than Googling?

I was giving a talk not long ago and mentioned that as far as I knew, there was only one memory trainer, developed by Posit Science (www.positscience.com), that had gone through extensive clinical trials, when a woman raised her hand and begged to differ. Well, she didn’t really beg—it was more like she insisted.

She mentioned a product called MindFit, which was developed in Israel by a psychologist named Schlomo Breznitz and his company, CogniFit (www.cognifit.com) and said that it had undergone extensive clinical testing as well. When I asked if the results of those trials had been published in peer-reviewed publications, she said she didn’t know. (When I asked a representative of the company, I was sent a couple of posters that it had presented at scientific meetings. They were definitely interesting and showed good results, but there was no independent verification.)

The Posit program, which I like a lot, even though it requires a fairly significant, short-term time commitment—about an hour a day for a little over a month—was developed by University of California San Francisco neuroscientist Michael Mezenich. Dr. Mike is an interesting character—when I met him he looked as though he might have slept in his shirt. He was a one of the inventors of the Cochlear implant, and he was one of the first scientists to actually show how the brain changes in response to learning. He’s been working on brain “plasticity” most of his professional life, and the Posit Science program comes out of that work.

Where most brain trainers engage you in activities designed to exercise a particular part of memory—i.e. lists of words for short term memory—Posit works off a different idea altogether. Dr. Merzenich’s hypothesis is that as the brain gets older it has a harder time filtering out distractions. It’s noisy, full of static, and as a consequence, information doesn’t get into the brain efficiently, if at all. What the first Posit program (there are two now) does, is work on helping you make fine distinctions with your ears and really improve your auditory processing. The idea is that once your brain is trained to hear more clearly, you will also remember more clearly. In a trial at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Southern California of nearly 600 participants, that is exactly what happened. The way one of the researchers explained it to me was that after going through the Posit protocol, participants tested “ten years younger” on their memory tests. You can read about the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Not being peer-reviewed doesn’t mean that a program doesn’t work. Being peer-reviewed simply means that the results of a clinical trial have been vetted. (You can make up your own mind, extrapolating, say, to politics, what the consequences of limited vetting might be….) And, truth be told, MindFit is a fun, not especially labor-intensive program. You’ll have to take it on faith when the company says that its programs are better for the mind than traditional computer games like Tetris. In the CogniFit clinical trial, participants showed improvement in spatial short-term memory, spatial learning and focused attention—all good things. But the group using the classic computer games showed gains, too, only not as much.

Of course the big news in the brain training biz this week is that Dr. Gary Small, at UCLA, has shown that surfing the web is good for the aging brain, too. After scanning a group of seniors some of whom had been reading and others web-surfing, “The researchers found that both reading and searching the Internet increased activity in parts of the brain that control language, reading, memory and visual abilities. However, searching the Internet also boosted activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate parts of the brain and that activity was two times more pronounced in those with experience using the web.”

Whether, in the end, this will turn out to be meaningful no one can yet say. After all, maybe looking things up in the Yellow Pages stimulates the frontal lobes, too. No one has done that study yet.

You remember the Yellow Pages, don’t you?