Computer games aim to keep aging brains sharp
Posted on Thursday, September 27, 2007
WASHINGTON — Glenys Dyer, 82, is drawing Queen Elizabeth on the tiny screen of her Nintendo video game player. Suddenly her instructor — a cartoon figure on the screen — tells her to shift gears and draw a picture of herself, then read a passage from a novel aloud.
“Our children gave this game to us,” says her husband, John Dyer, 83, as he watches his wife do her daily Nintendo Brain Age exercises. “The concept is to help the brain with rapid calculation and rapid reading.”
The Dyers, who live in a retirement community in Alexandria, Va., are part of a brain health movement sweeping such communities nationwide.
Much as physical fitness buffs hit the gym daily, senior citizens are doing brain exercises to tone their minds. The theory — so far with little hard science behind it — is that mental stimulation slows memory loss and other cognitive declines associated with aging.
Encouraged by research suggesting the brain can sprout new cells and rewire existing ones late in life, senior communities are supplementing their lineup of bingo and art classes with new video games, Sudoku puzzles and computer activities.
In addition to their Brain Age game, the Dyers stretch their brains with several computer programs, including one called Brain Fitness. More than 100 retirement communities nationwide offer the software, developed by neuroscientists in California, who say it improves memory by teaching the brain to interpret sounds faster and more accurately.
In Bowie, Md., residents of the HeartFields Assisted Living Center are playing virtual bowling on the Nintendo Wii, a video game that administrators hope will challenge residents’ visual and motor skills.
“In the past year we have made a big push to get the mind working, not just stimulated, but actively working on topics,” said Leslie Ray, the center’s executive director. “That’s because research is showing that keeping your brain powered up fights Alzheimer’s disease.”
Scientists seem to agree that at least four activities can defend the brain against age and disease — eating fresh fruits and vegetables, doing regular aerobic exercise, performing challenging mental tasks and engaging in social pursuits.
The Alzheimer’s Association has promoted all four in the 5, 000 Maintain Your Brain workshops it has conducted over the past three years at senior centers and corporate workplaces.
In Arkansas, the association offers two workshops — Maintain Your Brain and Healthy Brain Strategies.
For information, the Alzheimer’s Association has a national toll-free number, (800 ) 272-3900. There are four offices in Arkansas — call (501 ) 265-0027 in Little Rock, (479 ) 783-2022 in Fort Smith, (479 ) 855-2288 in Bella Vista or (479 ) 713-1466 in Fayetteville.
Additional information is available at the association Web site at www. alz. org.
Physical exercise and socalled brain food have long been regarded as good for mental health — exercise because it boosts blood circulation and gives the brain more oxygen, and foods rich in antioxidants, such as fish, fruits and vegetables, because the antioxidants attack cell-destroying agents.
But recent attention is being focused on brain exercise because neuroscientists have been making fresh discoveries.
Baby boomers may be the biggest catalyst of the brainfitness boom. The nation’s over-65 population will double between 2000 and 2030 — from 35 million to 72 million people. That forecast has triggered an entrepreneurial rush to supply anti-aging products.
But retirement communities are not the only market for brain exercise. A growing body of research suggests that mental activity in middle age and earlier can help later in life. As a result, Web sites such as HappyNeuron. com (www. happy-neuron. com ) are offering online games to people of all ages, while blogs like SharpBrains. com provide commentary on the fledgling industry.
“No technology trend in fitness has gotten more media attention than cognition training,” says Andrew Carle, a George Mason University professor who studies brain-training products. “What’s driving it is the jump we are seeing in Alzheimer’s, which is an age-related disease.”
More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, in which a large number of the brain’s 200 billion nerve cells degrade and die. The Alzheimer’s population is projected to jump to 7. 7 million by 2030, the time the last of the baby boomers reach 65.
Brain decay is wider, because all human brains lose nerve cells as they age. Brain neurons typically start dying when people are in their 20 s, a loss that accelerates and eventually causes cognitive declines that tend to show up first in memory and hearing.
Scientists have known for decades that brain decay is not inevitable, because long-term studies have shown that some minds stay relatively sharp while others decline dramatically, notes Shlomo Breznitz, psychology professor and former president of Israel’s University of Haifa. More recent studies suggest a key difference may be the extent to which each brain is challenged throughout life.
“People who engage in very challenging tasks — not just in work but during leisure activities such as reading, crossword puzzles, bridge, chess and travel — tend to slow down their mental aging process very significantly,” says Breznitz, who has developed a brain-training program called MindFit.
To be effective, scientists say, mental activity must become progressively more challenging. Otherwise, the brain adjusts and learns to perform repetitive tasks with less effort.
Also contributing to the brain workout boom are stateof-the-art imaging techniques that have allowed scientists to validate a theory developed decades ago. By taking detailed pictures of brain neurons, scientists watch parts of the brain that had seemed dormant light up and assume new responsibilities in response to stimuli. Theoretically, this means brain decay can be halted or even reversed.
“The brain is constantly rewiring and recalibrating itself in response to what you do,” says Henry Mahncke, who has a doctorate in neuroscience and is vice president of Posit Science, the San Francisco developer of the Brain Fitness software. “It remakes itself into a more efficient operation to do the things you ask it to do.”
The trick is finding the right stimuli.
Posit Science developed auditory exercises by piggybacking on years of research showing the brain’s listening ability gets fuzzier with age. In an attempt to prove that its products work, the company has been funding clinical studies, including one published in a National Academy of Sciences journal last year, which purported to show that healthy people over 60 who used Brain Fitness turned back their memory clocks by 10 years.
Other scientists remain skeptical, noting that most basic research in this area so far has involved animals.
“There is not a lot of empirical evidence yet,” says Molly Wagster, chief of the neuropsychology of aging branch at the National Institute on Aging. “That is not to say these ideas don’t have plausibility. We all hope this may be the case, but in humans there have not been a lot of randomized clinical trials.”
Ellis Widner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette contributed to this report.
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