Brain games keep minds nimble
February 25, 2010
Susan Pigg
LIVING REPORTER
When baby boomer Colin Milner casts his mind to the future, he pictures a "wellness wall" – a high-tech home fitness system that will come with a hologram, instead of a personal trainer, to help put his aging brain through its paces.
Entrepreneur Steve Aldrich sees a day when the click of a mouse will not only boost your driving skills but maybe even stave off depression, attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.
And Catherine Grotto?
Well, the 63-year-old retiree just wants to be able to find her car keys – and ease concerns that she's losing her mind.
"It's kind of distressing when your family tells you that you're repeating yourself a lot. I was just happy to find something that could possibly help," says Grotto, who plays PositScience's InSight brain game for an hour most days.
No generation has been more brain-obsessed than boomers. Asked to list their greatest fears about growing old, they cite dementia right up there with running out of money.
That has fuelled an explosion in "cognitive training" games – computer programs such as Nintendo's Brain Fit, PositScience's Brain Fitness and CogniFit's Personal Coach.
"I find I'm just more alert now," says Grotto, whose concerned husband bought the program three months ago. "I'm more aware of what's going on around me."
The brain fitness market is expected to hit $5 billion or more by 2015, up from just $265 million in 2008. The games aren't cheap – anywhere from $90 to $395 U.S.
"It's a bit like the Wild West out there," says Milner, founder of the Vancouver-based International Council on Active Aging who was part of a team that tested some of the first games four years ago. "The challenge is knowing what's fact and what's fiction."
Milner believes the brain boom will be bigger than the fitness craze.
"I can see a day when there will be brain fitness centres at work and wellness walls at home where all you have to do is touch and drag, like on the movie Minority Report, and a hologram will pop up and coach you through your brain exercises."
Already, the computer games have gained an impressive following.
Young Drivers of Canada has seen a marked decline in accidents since making CogniFit's New Driver part of its program. It's now offering CogniFit's Senior Driver program to older motorists looking to brush up their skills.
Since U.S. car insurance giant Allstate partnered with PositScience to offer its DriveSharp program to about 100,000 Pennsylvania drivers, it has seen a significant decrease in accident claims among those who used the program more than 10 hours.
Toronto's Baycrest Centre, world renowned for its cutting edge brain research and expertise on aging, recently announced a new commercial endeavour, Cognicity, in partnership with Canada's innovation incubator, MaRS. This year, they will begin test marketing Memory@Work, a brain game grounded in 20 years of cognitive research and aimed at helping boomers stay in the workforce longer.
Web-based games and memory exercises that can be played on mobile phones are also in the works.
"We have an opportunity to make major progress in brain health in the 21{+s}{+t} century, similar to what happened with cardiovascular health in the 20{+t}{+h}, and technology will play a crucial role," says Dr. Bill Reichman, Baycrest's CEO.
Think of the brain as Highway 401. As that major artery gets blocked up by the ravages of time, it helps to have alternative routes that you can take when needed to help get you to your destination quickly.
And that, it seems, is what brain games do: The very act of playing the games stimulates your brain, rewires neural pathways and opens up some of those secondary routes, in the same way that physical exercise helps your heart.
PositScience, one of the few companies to back up its claims with scientific research, says it has had such rave reviews from customers since launching its first game in 2006 that researchers are now looking at whether they can help tackle a host of other issues affecting the brain.
"Depression is a chemical dysfunction of the brain, so if you can get the brain to work better, you should be able to impact depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, mild cognitive impairment and chemo fog (the fuzzy brain that can affect cancer patients), so we have some small-scale studies we are doing in each of those different areas," says Steven Aldrich, CEO of San Francisco-based PositScience.
The website www.50plus.com has found such incredible demand for online games that David Cravit, executive vice-president of Zoomer Media, has been searching the world for more. Some are customized educational tools that not only challenge your skills, but test your understanding of, say, diabetes and how best to manage the condition.
"Increasingly, the big concern among boomers is going to be management of chronic conditions – osteoporosis, high blood pressure, diabetes. Why not incorporate some of these things into games so you can have fun, accumulate points as you learn more about your own condition?"
But can clicking on colourful balls actually push back the hands of time?
"Everything is relative. We live in a capitalist society where you can make all kinds of claims," says Alvaro Fernandez, a San Francisco-based researcher who recently pulled together 40 speakers and 240 interested participants from 15 countries on a "virtual conference" via computer on brain games.
"The only claims we think are surreal are when people talk about brain age – that you can make your brain younger. Most of the companies are pretty reasonable, but of course they try to manipulate each claim to their own benefit, much like the `anti-aging' industry."
For more information on brain games and some test games see:
www.sharpbrains.com
www.brainage.com
www.positscience.com
www.cognifit.com
www.lumosity.com
www.50plus.com
Susan Pigg focuses on issues around aging and baby boomers.
Toronto Star