Brain Training and Age

So the last post I wrote about Brain Training software ended with a slight bummer. With all of the excitement about brain training software Scientific Learning has produced, it appears to not be all that effective. With all the supposed science behind these games something has obviously gone awry with Scientific Learning's program. Was the software not interesting enough for the kids? Did the program not improve the correct parts of the brain? There are a multitude of factors that could have gone wrong. So for this post we'll look at another company making the same sort of claims of cognitive improvement. However, instead of targeting developing youth, this company is targeting the other spectrum of the population, declining elders. Hopefully they are having more success.

Posit Science is a California company based on the work by Dr. Merzenich (As it turns out he also helped found Scientific Learning and has his name in over 200 papers - busy guy). The company has seen a lot of media time recently and is home to a large and prestigious research team. I'll leave it to them to describe their company's purpose.

"drug-free programs to address cognitive issues related to healthy aging, as well as a broad range of other conditions, including Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia, and chemobrain." (http://www.positscience.com/about)

It's been shown that once 60 hits cognitive abilities may begin to decline (http://www.healthandage.com/html/min/afar/content/other6_1.htm ). This company is working on creating software that will help keep your brain in top shape as the years start to get to you.

Their website of course makes a lot of impressive claims, but it also offers a very nice study published in the American Geriatrics Society (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122189596/abstract, the full article can be accessed through the research portal). The study design is described as multi-center, prospective, randomized, controlled, and double-blind. Sounds good right? I'll try a brief summary for us normal's. The study divided 487 people into an experimental group and control group. In the experimental group the participants used the Posit Science program for an hour a day 5 days a week for 8 weeks. In the control group instead of the Posit Science program, a simple computer-based learning software was used; the software was basically watching instructional segments and being quizzed on them. The analysis of the two groups after 8 weeks provided some interesting results. In the experimental group they found that participants had gained approximately 10 years of improvement in memory. This was determined by increases in multiple standard measures of memory, independent of the posit science software. Three out of four members of the experimental group also reported positive changes in daily life. Both of these results were significantly greater than the control group.

This is a pretty good outcome for Posit Science. This study shows that their software is a pretty reasonable tool in keeping brains "young". An interesting question to ask is how come this company seems to be so successful at their goals while Scientific Learning is struggling so much. Remember that the company is founded by a lot of the same research from the same guy, Dr. Merzenich. Is the biggest difference between the two companies the people using the software? Perhaps brain training software is just more useful to older brains at this point in the research.

A deeper look into the science behind each game involved with each program would perhaps reveal some clue to why older users seem to benefit more than younger. It would also be interesting to see what kind effects Posit Science software had on a younger population or vice versa. But until that day the result of this study (and others) is good news for businesses in the field of keeping the elderly on top of their game.

Video Games in the class room

The most interesting thing I found from the Baek's article, "What Hinders Teachers in Using Computer and Video Games in the Classroom? Exploring Factors Inhibiting the Uptake of Computer and Video Games", was the divide he observes between experienced and inexperienced teachers.

The article claims that experienced teachers think curriculum inflexibility and negative effects of gaming are bigger problems than then inexperienced teachers. This seems to make sense. Teachers with more experience are most likely older and therefore have less experience with video games; video games haven't been around that long. Curriculum inflexibility and negative effects are both reactions I would expect from people with less experience with video games.

I feel as though (I'm just going with personal experience here, and I'm a pretty heavy gamer) people who play more video games see less negative effects of them. They don't accept the media's stereotype of video games as starting points for violence or a home to mindless zombies.

Curriculum inflexibility is probably a reaction caused by a lack of knowledge of the wide array and depth of the video game world. Somebody who didn't spend a lot of time gaming probably doesn't see how flexible today's games are. As games are becoming more and more powerful they provide more and more opportunity to fit niches that inflexible curriculums offer. In the early stages of the gaming timeline games were made with only sparse environments and even sparser methods of interactions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game)). I can see how it might be difficult to find methods of using these old games to match very specific mandated lesson plans. However, I feel that new games offer a much wider range of possible lessons that can easily be adapted to fit the strictest of curriculum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life).

So now that we've got the more experienced teachers with less video game experience figured out we can move on to the opposing side. The article claims that less experienced teachers claim lack of supporting materials and fixed class schedules as the culprit behind the integration challenge. Going along with the idea that less experienced teachers have more video game expertise these claims also are reasonable.

More experienced gamers see the power that new video games can offer. They understand that the games of today can be creatively molded to fit the everyday curricula. The problems they offer up are that there should be more time to work with these programs and better machines to run them. Video games of today require the latest in hardware support as hardware is always on the catch up to software. Not only do they need the latest hardware, they need more time to utilize all the power that this hardware has to offer. Games of today are complex, intricate, and absorbing. Students would need more time to interact and explore all that the games offer.

So if people with more gaming experience are the ones putting these issues at the top, then it may be surprising to see that women share this same view more than men. In the article it states that lack of supporting materials, fixed class schedules, and limited budgets are all seen as bigger problems to women than men. . It seems unlikely that women would be the more experienced gender when it comes to video games. As it turns out (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4634519.stm) woman make up the majority of the gamers in South Korea (a mind blowing 69%) which is where the study was taken.

Interestingly enough, with my arguments now made, the article says nothing about age or video game experience correlations. The article makes no mention about these two background categories in the discussion. This is strange to me as they seem so trivially vital to the understanding of this problem. The only reason I can see for why the author would leave this information out is that no statistically significant conclusions could be made from the perspective of these categories. If this is the case, I'm afraid my above arguments are bust as they require a correlation between teaching experience and age/video game experience. Either way I'd like to end by giving my resound approval for seeing video games in class rooms.

Education and Brain Training

The relationship between brain training and education (or ones schooling) is very similar to the relationship between lifting weights and basketball.  The idea is that if you invest a lot of time into building up the tools used in the activity you will be better able to perform.

For example, one tool basketball player’s use is the ability to jump. The higher a player can jump the more opportunities become available to score or defend shots. To increase your ability to jump you have to strengthen certain muscles. Obviously, playing lots of basketball would no doubt slowly build up these muscles. But, if you were to augment your basketball training with a more efficient way of strengthening your jumping muscles than you would be at an advantage.  Lifting weights is a much more efficient form of exercise for making specific muscles stronger.

 Indeed, professional basketball teams take weight lifting quite seriously and the players are made to invest a good chunk of their time in the gym (http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/features/kellers_muscle_081205.html).  For professional basketball teams, it is paramount to give their players every advantage on the court that they can. One way they’ve found to do this is by taking a step off the courts and into the weight room.

As discussed in previous posts brain training is meant to be a weight room for the brain.  A weight room filled with machines to improve the tools that are used in education. Figuring out what to put in this weight room has been a much harder task than the squat machine of basketball gyms. Lots of hard work has been devoted to identifying what tools there are and the methods to augment them.

One company is not letting all of this hard work go to waste. Scientific Learning (http://www.scilearn.com/ ) is creating software to act as this weight room and they are working very closely with many different school districts around the country.

Let’s first look at some of the software being used and then take a look at how it’s being implemented.  One of their products, Fast ForWord^® Literacy (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/), is designed to help students with reading.

“Fast Forward Literacy moves middle and high school students toward grade level reading skills, with a focus on listening accuracy, phonological awareness, and language structures.”

In order to accomplish this goal the software is designed to help improve the tools that are used during reading. The tools it claims to augment are memory, attention, a variety of input processing, and sequencing.

“To accelerate reading progress, Fast ForWord Literacy develops critical brain processing efficiency in four key areas:

• Improves memory by requiring holding a word or statement in short-term memory while retrieving picture-concept associations from long-term memory.
• Improves attention by making students focus on the tasks at hand.
• Strengthens processing ability through auditory, visual, and linguistic processing of orally and visually presented stories for meaning and comprehension.
• Develops sequencing through exercises that require using word order to comprehend simple and complex statements and instructions and organizing a response that follows the specified sequence of actions.“

The software uses a variety of different games to “workout the muscles” behind each tool. One of the games designed to increase auditory and visual working memory (a subject I’ll blog about later) is called Lunar Tunes. In this game there is a board divided into a grid with each cell containing either a syllable or word. The grid contains a pair of each syllable or word and the goal is to find the two matching cells. The basic idea is that the player will have to memorize which cell contains which sound or word and with practice the player will develop a better and better memory for sounds and words. This increase in memory ability can then be, hopefully, transferred over to the act of reading.

Another example of a game used in the software package is called Space Racer. In this game there are two buttons, one pointing up and the other down.  Two sounds are presented and the player must decide whether the pitch of the second sound was higher or lower than the first sound. The player responds by clicking the appropriate button.  The end goal of this game is to provide the player with improved listening accuracy and memory that can later be applied to reading.

The software package provides a number of other games that are designed to enhance the tools used in reading. In attempt to make it the games more children friendly the games are made with an outer space and alien theme in mind. Also, built into each game are rewards and difficulty progressions to try and keep the user interested and progressing.  As strange and useless as some of the games may seem there is a considerable body of work behind them that will have to be discussed another day. A demo of each of the games can be found here (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/?tabs=tabSet1:5).

Now that we’ve discussed what the software is it’s only appropriate we look at who is using it and does it actually work. To answer the first questions let’s take a look at one of the case studies presented on their site (http://www.scilearn.com/results/success-stories/case-studies/liberty-public-schools-unlocks-students-potential-for-learning-improves-missouri-assessment-program-scores.php).  The story starts out in a suburban area outside of Kansas City. The characters in the story are students identified by teachers and low test grades that are struggling with reading. The hero in the story of course is Fast ForWord and with a regimen of the software at around 30 minutes a day our characters will all be saved. This seems to be the generic story and it’s not an unpopular one, since the programs introduction in 1997 to 2007 more than half a million students from over 3,500 schools have used it (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/WWC_Fast_Forword_070907.pdf).

Now for the big question, does the thing actually work? Is the thirty minutes invested in Fast ForWord software more useful than thirty minutes of just practicing reading? Should children be taken off the courts for a little while to lift some Scientific Learning weights? The Scientific Learning website provides easy access to literally hundreds of its own studies that exclaim the program as a complete success. After reading a few, I began to see a pattern of very lazy methodology and stretching conclusions. For example, in this paper (http://www.scilearn.com/alldocs/rsrch/sbr/30115annearundeledurpt.pdf) a study was done in the Anne Arundel County school district. The experimental group in the study was very poorly designed as the group consisted of differing ages, initial ability, and background wasn’t even mentioned. The result of the paper was that more kids that had got “direct instruction” and Fast ForWord made it to proficient level than kids who just got Fast ForWord. This result is very shaky as there was no real control for “direct instruction” between the groups. The papers conclusions were not very convincing.

Luckily, Scientific Learning was kind enough to offer a few independent studies that were more convincing of the actual usefulness of Fast ForWord. The U.S department of Education did a review (http://www.scilearn.com/results/scientifically-based-research/independent-reviews/) of all of Scientific Learning’s studies up to 2007. They found that out of 115 studies 5 of them met the evidence standards of the review. I believe this after reading a few of them myself.  The results of the 5 good studies as determined by the review were summarized as follows:

“The WWC reviewed 115 studies on Fast ForWord®.9 Five of these studies met WWC evidence standards, one study met WWC evidence standards with reservations, and the remaining studies did not meet WWC evidence screens. Based on these six studies, the WWC found positive effects on alphabetics and mixed effects on comprehension. The evidence presented in this report may change as new research emerges.”

Alphabetics here is a category used in the review to examine effect on letter knowledge, phonics, and phonological awareness.

The evidence presented by the education department was pretty convincing to me that Scientific Learning’s program is not quite the miracle tool that the company’s website and research makes it out to be.  This is quite an interesting result for a company that has seen a considerable amount of growth in the past few years. Although, because of the difficulty of doing good research in education it may be that the programs benefits are just not well defined at this point.

The next question to ask after finding this result is why doesn’t the program work like it’s supposed to? Is it not working out the right “tools”, is it even possible to sharpen them? Is it not given to the right kind of people at the right point in development? These questions deserve answers and I’m sure Scientific Learning and others are working hard to find them. Until some of the answers appear though I think it may be better to leave children on the playing field of the class room and wait for the machines in the weight room to be repaired. 

An overview of the Brain Training world

For a long time humans have been devising ways to make themselves bigger, faster, stronger, and yes, even smarter. I think it’s fair to say we’ve gotten pretty good at the first three. In this high-tech world we live in pretty much anybody can wake up New Year’s Day and in six months be able to give Mariusz Pudzianowskia a run for his money.  Can that same person wake up with a slightly different resolution and six months later be eating quantum physics for breakfast? Probably not.  Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t seem to be as straight forward as a bicep and a curling bar.

So let’s try and break this thing down in order for everybody to wrap their head around why these programs could potentially be so cool. Let’s start with what do we use are brains for? Most of us utilize the three pounds upstairs to solve problems, both big and small. The people that can solve the problems others can’t get a special title; we call them smart or intelligent. Of course there is a lot more to it than that. People can be smart in one subject and dumb in another. People can have more experience with a certain type of problem. Some people just work harder at a problem for a longer period of time, “It’s not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer”, Einstein.

Interestingly enough, a man named Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, wanted to see what would happen if you stripped all of these factors from the equation. Galton is controversially accredited with the first IQ test.  Now, here comes the cool part. As it turned out, some people could still solve problems others couldn't. So of course the question to ask is what are the differences between the so called smart people and the not so smart people? What is it that allows some people to solve what most people would consider really hard problems? These are the really cool questions that scientists from a variety of backgrounds have been working on for a while now.

So where do these programs fit in?  These programs (the good ones anyway) are the result of the research being done to try and find the answers to these questions. They are fun, and sometimes silly, exercises that have been shown to work out the parts of the brain believed to be responsible for being smart. This is not to say that all of these programs promise to raise your IQ a hundred points (some do). Science is dirty, especially when experiments have people involved, but the results are in, conclusions have been made, and a market for brain training programs has been established.

Okay, so now that you’re hooked and want to know more I feel it is my duty to provide it. To be fair, this post is a rather simplified and generalized representation of what these brain training programs are all about. There is tons of science out there on the subject of intelligence and businesses are working furiously on trying to turn it all into a profitable technology. Hopefully, each future post will reveal more about this brave new dynamic. 

Intro

Imagine the most important thing you own. Done? What popped into your head first? Was it your car, your computer, your cell phone? Maybe it was the computer in your car that lets you make phone calls. Did you even consider the one thing that allowed you to consider the question? This blog is an attempt to look at the technology that is made to maintain or even augment what I consider my most important possession, my brain.

Being healthy is a big consideration for many people when deciding how to spend their time, energy, and money. There are gyms in every town, fitness magazines in every check out aisle, and “low fat” labels on every profitable edible substance. People want to be healthy, and businesses are more than happy to provide services with this goal. Go ahead and count the number of companies offering a get skinny quick diet. I dare you. Being healthy is big business.

What does it mean to be healthy though? If you go to the gym everyday you can lift more, run faster, and wear those pants from 10^th grade. If you eat right you feel better and have less of a chance of getting sick. But is that all there is to being healthy? Is being “smart” part of being healthy? Would you, or anybody else, be interested in a gym for your brain? Recently advancements in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience have lead to the development of an array of programs devoted to “exercising” your brain. But these programs are not as clear cut as the bench press or the tread mill of today’s gym.

As this blog develops, I will try and explore a wide variety of perspectives towards these magical programs. What are these programs? Is there any real hard science behind them? Do they actually work and what does that even mean? Who should use these programs? Who are the people developing them? What kinds of devices are being used with them? What would the world look like if a technology was discovered that could make everybody “smarter”? What are the moral issues associated with this kind of technology?

In my attempt to answer each of these questions I will try and be as scientific and unbiased as possible. Let me stress that I don’t have a secret agenda behind the purpose of this blog. In order to make this as interesting and accurate as possible I’m going to evaluate this new found market with a critical eye.

To give you a general idea of what these programs are about here is a link to one of the more popular companies (You'll have to sign up to play the games). As time goes on I will be posting more links leading to more examples of programs claiming to “increase brain power”.