November 9, 2008

Aging Well: Is "Brain Training" the New Fountain of Youth?

A recent AARP.org article offers to seniors five keys to living longer, but it might be more accurate to call them five keys to living better. The advice, which includes encouragement to seek work and volunteer opportunities, spiritual fulfillment and self-awareness, seems to credit longevity to living with purpose. After centuries of working to increase human lifespan primarily by way of improved medicine, food production, and access to care, researchers and aging individuals alike are now focusing on adding worth to the years we've gained beyond the numerical values. Simply put, to those devoted to the science of aging, quality is as important now as quantity.

When it comes to living well, although we have seen some innovation, much of the "new" information we are inundated with lately appears to many to be common sense, or at the very least a rehashing of what has already been discovered and divulged. A separate AARP.org article entitled "50 Ways to Boost Your Noodle" is one such example of this. The article is yet another recitation of the recycled mantra commanding aging persons to "sleep" and "get support for stressors," as if this information is somehow new or different to most semi-intelligent individuals. Although it may be true that there is a disconnect between what the American public knows is good to do and what it actually does, pieces of advice similar to those offered here usually fail to deliver the dramatic opportunity for a lifestyle revolution so often promised. In addition to merely annoying the readership with their repetition, some of the information shared can be confusing and even contradictory. The perfect example of this of course is the oft-heard question of exactly how many glasses of red wine one is supposed to drink per day, in order to achieve the optimal health benefits. One? Two? 1,000 (perhaps some claims are more obviously flawed than others)? Along with the constant directives to eat right and exercise for better health in our aging years, of particular interest and focus has been the ways in which older individuals can "train" their brains, or improve their cognitive functioning abilities by way of simple daily tasks and games. While these programs can be entertaining, the health benefits they bring are far from revolutionary, and most likely do not exceed those achieved by performing any other minorly engaging cognitive task that is already present in everyday life (such as reading a paper).

One field that has benefited tremendously from the growing public awareness of brain health maintenance in old age has been the brain "training" websites and programs. The games produced by these research teams and companies are full of brightly animated colors and addicting tasks, and test memory, attention, processing speed, and other executive functions of the brain that have been found to decrease in efficiency as we age (a sample game can be found here, a screen shot of which is shown to the left). Web-based Lumosity.com is one such enterprise that has garnered both media attention and user adoration in the years since its conception. The research organization behind the games is Lumos Lab, whose Scientific Advisory Board includes neuroscientists from Stanford University and UCSF. Links from the site to ongoing research reveal that the program is just part of a larger study, and even allows users to volunteer to participate in testing the newest brain training tools. The home page boasts a sample of the prestigious publications and outlets that have featuring the site, such as the New York Times, Women's Health magazine, and the Martha Stewart show ("I've been having so much fun," Martha claims). Multiple graphs, such as the one shown below, accompany the site's study-based claims of proven memory and attention improvement in individuals that play the games. The site itself is clean, attractive, and user friendly, and older audiences were clearly in mind when the navigation and layouts were designed. The website additionally sponsors a blog that highlights recently published research on brain health, such as a recent post about the effects of smoking on the brain written by a cognitive neuroscience research at SFSU and UCSF. In a demonstration of the organization's efforts to stay current, the myBrain Facebook application was launched in September 2008, allowing users to access many similar features from the popular social networking site.

A New York Times article that reviews Lumosity.com also points out that the website is not the only brain training game in town. Similar products have enjoyed their success as well, including Nintendo's Brain Age 2, which has sold 14 million copies worldwide since its release in 2005, and Happy-Neuron.com, which has partnered with AARP and can be accessed by visitors to that site. In fact, the so-called "brain fitness software" industry is a booming one, and expected by one company head to "reach $2 billion by 2015." Despite the popularity of these programs, fellow researchers, however, are more skeptical of the claims they make. For one thing, the notion that humans can exercise their brains much in the same way we exercise our muscles to gain stamina and performance is not exactly a novel idea. According to a New Scientist article, commercial brain training has been around for a decade, but has only recently begun to achieve mainstream attention. Moreover, there remains no clear answers to several questions, one of which being whether the games enhance brain functioning or merely slow the decline. The answer to the most significant question, does it work? "It depends." Writer Graham Lawton goes on to cite problems in the research designs of Lumos Labs' studies, including a small number of participants and the lack of findings being published in a peer-reviewed journal. Overall, the article likens brain enhancing programs like Lumosity.com to anti-aging creams, an analogy I find to be applicable for nearly all of the advice and information on living better as we live longer. While there is no one study that can be conclusively pointed to as proof that these tools and tricks work, alternatively there is no study to prove that they do not. Games promising to train one's brain are perhaps no help, but are definitely no harm, so why not?

2 comments:

Jonathan Haber said...

Katie, first off I thought you chose a very interesting topic to cover in your post. It's one I personally have not paid much attention to but still have thought about enough to make it appeal to me and I am sure other readers as well. Your first couple paragraphs do a great job to introduce the bulk of your story, which lay in Lumosity.com. You made it very clear early that advice is shifting from living longer to living smarter, and I was fully aware of the change thanks to your informative research in the first couple paragraphs. You even added some humor with the red wine question, which helps break up a post that could easily just be fact after fact. Additionally, your jump to brain "training" web sites provided me, and other readers as well, with a chance to dig deep into what you introduced in your first couple paragraphs. You wrote a solid critique of Lumosity.com and provided great links and insight to help the reader understand what these kind of web sites are about.

However, you may have dug a little too deep in terms of subscription fees and describing the site because you did already provide a link for the reader. Moving on, I really enjoyed that your concluding paragraph posed a question I was thinking about since you first mentioned these "training" web sites. Do they work? While there was no evidence as to whether they work or just slow down the aging process, diving into that question helped me understand that the answer is unknown at this point, but there is no way these games can hurt the brain. If I had to pick out some small errors, you had a couple grammatical mistakes("an sample") and remember to remain consistent when you italicize text (New York Times). Other than that, great informative piece and very strong writing.

geneven said...

This was an interesting point of view, and had the positive aspect that it doesn't swallow whole the assumptions that these sites would like to be made, in the interest of their bottom lines.

Lumosity is great fun, but it has made some strange decisions and sites some strange statistics. For example, (1) who are these people the statistics compare you with? Typical users? People who dropped by once and tried the site? The obvious intent, it seems to me, of the statistics is to give you bad results and encourage you to join and improve your skill. But the least they should do is specify which people are in the pool vying for statistical superiority.
(2) There's a face-remembering game, where you are shown a face and a name, asked to link them and recall them later. The funny thing is, as you play repeated trials of the game, the same faces are linked with the same names! This of course means that people who play on the site a lot are going to get better scores -- but this has nothing to do with improving memory, it seems to me. It means denizens of the site are rewarded with higher scores, so the money they are paying rewards them with self-esteem.

I am a fervent chess player, and my skill in that game did not transfer at all to the Lumosity site, interestingly enough. I have been known to play a blazingly fast form of chess called Lightning, in which the maximum time of a game is two minutes total, for hours on end, game after game. I would think that would be at least as good as the Lumosity games to keep my brain active, and it is a lot less expensive.

 
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