Is your brain LISTENING?
September 29th 2008 21:45
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What is it about mental activity that helps the brain?
Any type of mental challenge forces brain cells to make new connections with each other. This process, known as plasticity, enables the brain to retain impressions from the senses, form memories and store the knowledge we acquire. When plasticity becomes sluggish, as it often does in old age, new connections don't form as easily, and new knowledge becomes harder to acquire and retain. Many scientists now believe that Alzheimer's disease results from the exhaustion of brain plasticity.
But muscles that get slack with age respond to exercise, and scientists think that neurons that get sluggish with age respond to mental stimulation.
Michael Merzenich, a professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, has taken that idea to the bank. After distinguishing himself as a neuroscientist through his research into the brain's ability to form new connections, he formed Posit Science Corp., which sells computer games based on his ideas about stimulating brain plasticity.
His Brain Fitness program, for example, introduced in 2004, is designed to build the brain's ability through a variety of exercises, including one that involves recognizing sounds.
What do sounds have to do with memory?
According to Merzenich, the loss of plasticity in the aging brain reduces a person's ability to process information that comes in through the senses. Improve that processing and you strengthen everything about the brain, Merzenich believes, including memory.
"When neuropsychologists think of (memory) deficits, their instinct is to say, 'You can't remember, so let's practice remembering,' " Merzenich says. "That's very wrong-headed. The reason people can't remember is not that they've lost the trick of remembering. It's usually because the quality of information delivered to the memory is degraded. We train the person to more accurately process information."
For example, people who use Brain Fitness listen to electronic sounds that rise or fall. At first it's easy to tell the sounds apart, but gradually the sounds become very brief, and detecting whether they are rising or falling becomes very challenging. Listening closely to these sounds challenges not just hearing, but discrimination, attention, focus and other skills that tend to grow weaker with age. Brain Fitness includes other exercises that involve listening to syllables that sound very similar, and to stories, which demand attention to detail. Merzenich also sells a program called InSight, which contains similar exercises for vision. His programs sell for $295 for one user, or $395 for two (www.posit science.com).
As evidence that his methods work, Merzenich points to a 2006 study that found 93 percent of the elderly participants who used Brain Fitness for several months showed lasting cognitive improvement. Some, he says, improved their memory to the point where they performed as well as people decades younger on tests of memory and other mental abilities.
If you'd like to know more, use the following link to the article in the St. Petersburg Times, US,
link to the article which contains more than I've included here.
So, do keep listening won't you?
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