Brain fitness may help you avoid the risk of being bored, and that’s almost undoubtedly a good thing. In an ongoing study in the UK, researchers found that those who reported the most boredom when they were evaluated in the late 1980s were two and a half times more likely to die by 2009.

But it’s not clear exactly why boredom might increase someone’s risk of death. The authors of the study in the International Journal of Epidemiology suggest that a report of boredom probably represents some other problem. Bored people may be depressed or anxious, for example, factors that have already been related to disease risk in a number of studies. They may be more likely to drink excessively or smoke and less likely to exercise, all factors that might increase risk for cardiovascular disease.

An important part of any brain fitness program is staying actively engaged with friends and the community. Other studies have shown, for example, that having friends or being involved in a volunteer program can reduce the risk of cognitive decline. This finding underlines the fact that your thoughts, feeling, and behavior can have significant effects on your health.

Reference:

Britton A, Shipley MJ. Bored to death? International Journal of Epidemiology, available online February 1, 2010.

Available online (free) at the journal website.

While I doubt that most of the free games or training programs have the same impact as better-designed programs such as Dakim, Lumosity, CogniFit, or Posit, I think that it is likely that trying something new is good for your brain.

Some of you may have heard about the studies on Internet searching done by Dr. Gary Small and his colleagues. They have shown that Internet searching activates key brain centers that may be helpful in keeping your brain healthy. You can read more in an LA Times article here.

Maybe one of the keys is novelty. Doing something, almost anything, that is new may ask your brain to make new connections. Although the science is speculative, when you look at the direction that research is going it looks as though doing new things that make your mind process information in new ways may be essential in improving brain fitness.

In a recent post on this site, I talked about  reducing anxiety by not catastrophizing. Gary Dashney at www.onlinebraingamesblog.com made a comment, and that led me to look at his site. He has collected an impressive list of games, and wrote an excellent post on his thoughts on the characteristics of good brain games. You can find the article on his blog here. The site also has an extensive list of free brain games online here. Even if you don’t use all (or any) of them regularly, if you look through Gary’s list you can become more familiar with what’s on the Internet.

Just as studies have shown that stress can have a negative effect on your memory, it’s pretty clear that anxiety can make it harder to remember things, too. We’ve probably all had the experience of trying to remember a name or a word and feeling frustrated about not being able to come up with it. Paradoxically, the harder you try to remember, the less you’ll be able to do so.

So far, that’s pretty normal. Younger people have the same kind of trouble with their memory occasionally, although it may happen more frequently as we get older. It’s what happens next that makes it different for older persons.

Many of my older patients may have a problem with remembering a word or a name, but they go one step further: When they can’t remember something, they start worrying about it. They may interpret the fact that they can’t remember means they have a memory problem, maybe even Alzheimer’s disease!

Sometimes, when people start worrying about a problem, they think of the absolutely worst thing that it could mean. A cloud in the sky, for example, may mean that a tornado is coming. We call that catastrophizing. It’s not good English, but it is pretty clear what it means. It means taking a real problem and magnifying it by exaggerating it to the worst possible outcome.

How do you avoid catastrophizing? When you begin to feel worried or anxious, try to stop and consider alternate explanations for whatever you’re worried about. Could that cloud just mean that there’s a cloud, not that a tornado is coming? Odds are that the answer is yes. Is having trouble remembering annoying. Yes. Does it mean that you have a serious memory disorder or neurological disease? Probably not.

As always, there’s no substitute for a thorough evaluation of your memory by a competent clinician. An evaluation ought to include assessment of your general ability, concentration, and memory. And never forget the importance of taking care of other medical problems, such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

Unlike most other programs, the Dakim System isn’t a software package that you have to install on your own computer. It arrives in a box, complete with a computer that’s already set up with the program. All you have to do is open up the box and plug in the computer.

And the computer that comes with the system is the most user-friendly machine I’ve ever seen. The initial set up is explained to you by the computer over speakers that are built in to the unit. And you don’t have to use a keyboard or a mouse to use the system. You just touch the screen to answer questions as the computer is set up. That’s also how you interact with the computer when you start the training program.

The training program includes a nice variety of tasks that tap attention, memory, and problem solving. The tasks use materials that are likely to be familiar to users over 50, such as movie clips from old films, and change quickly enough to keep you from getting bored. The unit can be connected to the Internet to get updated materials, so you will be able to use the System for a long time to come. The new material requires that you pay a monthly subscription, though, so that’s an extra cost of the system.

The program has multiple levels of difficulty, so you will be able to make steady progress as you work with it. The program is just right for many users over 50, but doesn’t include tasks that focus on working memory (remembering more than one thing at a time and then thinking about them) and it’s not clear to me how well it will help you develop processing speed (how fast you can take things in and make decisions about them).  Other programs include these tasks, but in our experience they may be too difficult for many users. The Dakim System is likely to be accessible to almost every user.

Overall, then, the Dakim BrainFitness System is probably best suited for people who don’t already have a computer and don’t already know how to use a mouse and keyboard. The touch screen format makes the unit very easy to set up and use. The program content will give users a regular mental work out that will help them keep their brains working. I give the Dakim BrainFitness System an A+ for usability. The program content will help users keep the minds active, and will help you track your progress.

Update at 2:15 PM:The folks at Dakim point out to me that several of the subtests do, in fact, help train working memory. I stand corrected.  They also let me know that they’re working on a speed of processing task for inclusion in a future update.

The computer-based training involves a procedure called n-back training. It’s been used for a long time in neuropsychological or cognitive assessment activities as a way to evaluate working memory. In single n-back, you have to remember, for example, the position of an object that appears intermittently in various positions on a computer screen. If you’re doing the task, you have to press a key on the computer when the object appears in the same place. In single n-back, you would watch to see if the object appears in the same two times in a row. If you are doing 2 n-back, then the object has to appear once in a specific place, then can appear somewhere else on the screen, and then appears again in the first position. The number refers to how many positions back you have to keep track of. It can go up to as many as 6 back.

In dual n-back, you have to do two n-back tasks at the same time. The other one can be auditory, for example. One task asks you to listen to numbers played on the computer’s speakers, with the same basic task. You have to remember whether a number you hear is the same as the one you just heard, or heard before the last one, and so on. It’s easier to understand if you try it out.

You can try it out in several places for free. It can be pretty challenging, but the original study showed that how well a person did the task didn’t matter so much as that the person did the task at the level that worked for them. Doing the task is a great way of training your attention, and another study has shown that this kind of training can make changes in the brain’s chemistry.

You can find try the task out at Soak Your Head (this site requires a browser plug-in called Silverlight, so you may see a message about installing it) and you can download a version for your own computer (free) at  Brain Workshop. Another free online version is at The Mindflow.