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In our last post, we discussed the research about the cognition benefit from playing Super Mario . New research qualifies the kind of games that might help. Not all will. Kind of Good News About Video Games A large study (2,800+ participants) performed by researchers from Indiana University, South Florida University of South Florida and Penn State University tracked individuals over 10 years. Participant groups received memory, reasoning, or speed of processing training, or were part of a control group. If you’ve had a vision study at your ophthalmologist, you’ve done something like the speed of processing video game used in the study. To play, you must spot something, such as a highway sign on a roadway, and then spot something else in the periphery. The faster you identify and click on the objects, the better you score. As the game proceeds, the background becomes more complex making it harder to find the images. The good news: participants playing that type of game had a ...

This brain builder is so good that we are quoting the title as published in a prestigious scientific journal : “Playing Super Mario 64 increases hippocampal grey matter in older adults.” It seems that some researchers from Montreal and St. John’s Newfoundland have nothing better to do than play video games. Well, not exactly. Gregory L. West, PhD and Benjamin Rich Zendel PhD, put together a research team to see if the brains of older adults would benefit from playing video games and, if so, exactly how. The team from the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland and from the Centre de Researche en Neurologie et Cognition at the University of Montreal, recruited 33 adults from ages 55 to 75. They used the standard test method with a control group and subject groups. The control group continued their normal activities. A second group took self-directed piano lessons (as we’ve covered before, research shows notable brain growth from learning to play a musical in...

Get Married; Have a Better Brain Married couples have a significantly lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease than single individuals. We didn’t see that finding coming.  A research paper in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry reported that singles had a 42% higher risk of dementia than couples. Widowed had an average of 20% higher. Curiously, divorced individuals had the same risk as married. Andrew Sommerlad, MD of the University of London, along with fellow researchers Joshua Ruegger and Archana Singh-Manoux MD, speculate that the benefit comes from social contact, communication, looking-out for each other and more mental activity. (We’ve written before on the extreme detriment of loneliness on health in general and brain health in particular). We’re speculating that the punch line is to get married if you’re not…. Build Up Endurance; Build Better Working Memory We were recently explaining to someone that one of the reasons that biological medicines a...

Middle-age spread associated with Alzheimer’s, and why Google may be bad for your brain. The News About Fat Just Keeps Getting Worse The Journal of Alzheimer’s and Dementia reported the results of a study on fat as an Alzheimer’s factor. This very large study-1.3 million subjects- reviewed data comparing Body Mass Index (BMI) to incurrence of dementia. BMI measures the relationship between height and weight. The finding was stark and severe: being over-weight at middle age increases the risk of dementia later in life . The study was performed by a highly-respected research team, led by Psychology Professor Mika Kivimaki at University College London and Ritva Luukkonen from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki and included experts from throughout Europe. Study details here . Consumer safety tip: it contains math you didn’t see in high school. Is Google Shrinking Your Brain ? Frank Gunn-Moore is a professor at the University of St And...