Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.

Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.

This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.

Reference:

Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

The members of the class are interested in my presentation, and we’ve done several exercises to help them learn more about what they can do to maintain and improve their memory.

Nothing is more helpful than understanding how your memory works, and probably the most critical issue for older persons and their memory is attention. Although it’s obvious (once you think about it), if you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t remember it.

Even the most commons memory complaints I hear from patients are often related to memory. The number one complaint is “I went in to another room to get something and forgot why I was there.” Whenever I mention this, I see lots of nods of recognition in the audience.

For many people, this issue is caused by failing to maintain attention on a specific task. While you’re going to the other room, your mind moves on to another topic (maybe you notice something else you’ve been meaning to do). By the time you get to the other room, you’ve lost the task you were thinking about in the first place.

The solution is to maintain focus on what you want to do, at least until you’ve been able to encode the task in your memory. This means keeping the task in mind while you go to the other room or rehearsing it several times before you move to the new room.

When we’re younger, we can depend on some things in our memory working automatically. As we get older, things that used to work automatically may require a little extra attention. Often, it’s not your memory that isn’t working, it’s how you’re paying attention.

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.

Several studies have shown that computer training can improve mental abilities. It’s not clear that any one program is better than any other. Having worked with a number of these programs, I see some elements in common that I think are likely make them helpful.

Working with computers seems to help people develop sustained attention. When a computer is giving you new tasks like math problems every few seconds, you have to pay close attention for as long as you’re working. Some programs promote sustained attention to what you hear and others do it for what you see. Both modalities may be helpful.

Another cognitive ability that is improved by computer training is processing speed. Processing speed may be a key ability that underlies other mental abilities. We slow down as we age, but training is clearly effective in speeding us up.

One widely-cited study showed that a particular kind of working memory training (dual n-back task) improved performance on a measure of fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the kind that declines most drastically with age, so this finding is especially intriguing.

So if you’re interested in maintaining and improving your brain fitness, it makes sense to spend some time every day in computer-based activities that engage your attention and demand that you think quickly. You can use one of the expensive computer packages, but I think you are likely to get similar effects from less expensive and even free programs. See my computer training page for links to computer training programs, with my comments on each. Click here to go to the computer training page.

How do you decide what software you should use?

First, I think it’s important to remember that nothing has been shown to stop cognitive aging or to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Brain fitness, a brain gym, or any other cognitive fitness program may help you maintain your current level of function and may improve some specific skills, such as memory and thinking speed. These are important benefits and make brain fitness programs worth considering.

As for the software, as with many things, it depends. Some software programs have been subjected to more rigorous testing than have others. On the other hand, most brain fitness software programs have similar content. They often include activities that try to help you improve your working memory, your ability to think and react quickly, and your capacity to do several things at once. Some software programs have very original ways to improving your ability to do things. Posit Science’s new offering, Cortext, now includes a software program that helps you improve your visual attention to the world around. This program was developed by Dr. Karlene Ball at the University of Alabama, and has been shown to improve older driver’s skills. It’s called the Useful Field of View, or UFOV.

Some activities built in computer brain training software and often used in brain gyms are pretty much the same whether you’re using an inexpensive handheld trainer. Others, like the UFOV, are only available in a specific package. So whether one program or another is best for you may depend on what kind of memory or other cognitive problems you are having trouble with, and what you want to improve.

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune describes some of the available software programs, and some creative ways that some older adults are figuring out how to maintain their function. The author of the article quotes Dr. Gene Cohen, Director of the Center on Aging at George Washington University, who says that what’s essential is some activity to “challenge your brain.” (Click here to see the article.)

One man, for example, reads books upside down to improve his cognitive flexibility. Another man takes opportunities to memorize numbers he sees around him. The author quotes one of the persons in this article as saying “Smart people find new ways to exercise their brains that don’t involve buying software or taking expensive workshops.”

I would say there are three important issues in deciding whether you use brain fitness software or go to a brain gym.

• The first is whether you want an evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses to help you guide your work in the brain gym. A comprehensive assessment also will give you a baseline to help determine whether any of your abilities change over time.
• The second issue is whether you want to benefit from a specific training activity that is only available in a specific software package. Some people think doing the brain puzzles of Sudoku (a game that asks to do mental arithmetic across several parts of a puzzle) is helpful. You can do that in books you can buy at the grocery store, or you can do it in an inexpensive handheld gaming device such as the Nintendo DS. On the other hand, if you want to work on certain visual or auditory skills, some of the software programs may be a better bet.
• The third issue is whether you want the help, encouragement, and support you can get from the staff in a brain fitness program. Just as many people do well in working out in a gym they have in their home, others find that actually going to a health club helps them stick with their program. This may be especially true if you have a personal trainer or are in a group.