Introducing Speed Brain for Palm® Pre™

Palm selects Lumosity to bring the first brain training game to the Palm Pre.

Designed to improve your processing speed and reaction time, Speed Brain exercises your ability to quickly understand information and react to it. You can also connect to your Lumosity account on your Palm Pre, which will allow you to track your Lumosity Brain Profile.

As with other Lumosity games, Speed Brain for webOS was created with heavy involvement from doctors, neuroscientists, and psychologists at universities worldwide.

Search for “Speed Brain” in the Palm Pre App Catalog.

We hope our Palm Pre users will enjoy their brain training on the go!

Lumosity for your future offspring?

Could the brain training you do today help the memory of your children – even before conception? Research published today suggests that – surprisingly – this might actually be possible.

A study of brain function in mice reveals that a stimulating environment improves the memory of their offspring. If this improvement also occurs in humans, a mother’s youthful experiences may help shape her childrens’ ability to learn. Here’s the press release, with the paper reference below the fold:

Newswise — A study reveals that the severity of learning disorders may
depend not only on the child’s environment but also – remarkably – on
the mother’s environment when she was young. The study in
memory-deficient mice, published in the February 4 issue of The
Journal of Neuroscience, was led by Larry Feig, PhD, professor of
biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the
biochemistry and neuroscience programs at the Sackler School of
Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University.

The researchers studied the brain function of pre-adolescent mice with
a genetically-created defect in memory. When these young mice were
enriched by exposure to a stimulating environment – including novel
objects, opportunities for social interaction and voluntary exercise –
for two weeks, the memory defect was reversed. The work showed that
this enhancement was remarkably long-lasting because it was passed on
to the offspring even though the offspring had the same genetic
mutation and were never exposed to an enriched environment.

Previous research has shown that environmental exposures during
pregnancy can affect offspring. “A striking feature of this study is
that enrichment took place during pre-adolescence, months before the
mice were even fertile, yet the effect reached into the next
generation,” said Feig.

“The offsprings’ improved memory was not the result of better
nurturing by mothers who were enriched when they were young. When the
offspring were raised by non-enriched foster mothers, the offspring
maintained the beneficial effect,” said co-author Junko Arai, PhD,
postdoctoral associate in Feig’s laboratory.

“The effect lasted until adolescence, when it waned, suggesting that
this process is designed specifically to aid the young brain,”
continued Shaomin Li, PhD, MD, co-author, former postdoctoral
associate in Feig’s laboratory, now at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“This example of ‘inheritance of acquired characters,’ was first
proposed by Lamarck in the early 1800s. However, it is incompatible
with classical Mendelian genetics, which states that we inherit
qualities from our parents through specific DNA sequences they
inherited from their parents. We now refer to this type of inheritance
as epigenetics, which involves environmentally-induced changes in the
structure of DNA and the chromosomes in which DNA resides that are
passed on to offspring,” said Feig.

Previous research by Feig and his team showed that a relatively brief
exposure to an enriched environment in both normal and
memory-deficient mice unlocks an otherwise latent biochemical control
mechanism that enhances a cellular process in nerve cells called
long-term potentiation (LTP), which is known to be involved in
learning and memory. This enhancement was detected in pre-adolescent
mice but not in adult mice, reflecting the brain’s higher plasticity
in the young.

Feig concluded that the transgenerational inheritance of the effect of
an enriched environment may be a mechanism that has evolved to protect
one’s offspring from deleterious effects of sensory deprivation, which
may be particularly potent in the young and exacerbated in the
learning disabled.

Junko Arai and Shaomin Li, first authors, contributed equally to the
paper. Dean M. Hartley, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center is also
an author.

The work was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the
National Institutes of Health because these findings were derived as
an offshoot of the Feig lab’s long-term experience working on Ras
proteins that are involved in cancer. Fundamental principles of how
Ras proteins function gained by studying its role in cancer expedited
subsequent studies on Ras function in the brain. This work highlights
how major breakthroughs can arise by allowing researches to follow new
leads that cross disciplines. The work was also supported by the Tufts
Center for Neuroscience Research.

Arai J, Li S, Hartley DM, and Feig LA. The Journal of Neuroscience.
2009. (February 4); 29(5): 1496-1502. “Transgenerational Rescue of a
Genetic Defect in Long-Term Potentiation and Memory Formation by
Juvenile Enrichment.” Published online February 3, 2009, doi:
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5057-08.2009

About Tufts University School of Medicine
Tufts University School of Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate
Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University are international leaders in
innovative medical education and advanced research. The School of
Medicine and the Sackler School are renowned for excellence in
education in general medicine, special combined degree programs in
business, health management, public health, bioengineering, and
international relations, as well as basic and clinical research at the
cellular and molecular level. Ranked among the top in the nation, the
School of Medicine is affiliated with six major teaching hospitals and
more than 30 health care facilities. The Sackler School undertakes
research that is consistently rated among the highest in the nation
for its impact on the advancement of medical science.

Coming soon: a sparkling new Lumosity!

The Lumos Labs team is excited to announce that in the next few weeks Lumosity is getting an upgraded look and lots of new features. We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but keep a watch out for new ways to understand and compare your brain performance, easier navigation, and more helpful tips about how Lumosity can make your life better.

You’ll be getting a sneak peek of new game designs starting next week! We’d love to hear what you think at games@lumoslabs.com.

Exercising Executive Function

Think you’re good at multitasking? Many people believe they get more done by doing several things at once, but usually they’re wrong. Every time you switch to a different activity, you must give up a moment to shift your attention to the new task at hand. Overall, doing more than one thing slows you down.

While it’s a good idea to avoid multitasking in your day-to-day activities, some multitasking is simply unavoidable. So, we’ve designed Brain Shift to help you become better at efficiently switching between different activities. You should still avoid multitasking when possible, but we hope this exercise will make you better at it for those times when you must.

You can find Brain Shift here: http://games.lumosity.com/brain_shift.html

Let us know what you think!

Brain Imaging Study Supports the “Cognitive Reserve” Hypothesis

Individuals with higher education levels appear to score higher on cognitive tests despite having evidence of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Newswise— Individuals with higher education levels appear to score higher on cognitive tests despite having evidence of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The cognitive reserve hypothesis holds that individuals with greater cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) abilities are able to delay symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease despite underlying changes in the brain, according to background information in the article. Education is commonly used as a substitute measure of cognitive reserve. “Adjusting for level of Alzheimer disease pathological burden determined at autopsy, greater education has been associated with better cognitive function during life,” the authors write. “Education interacts with Alzheimer disease pathological burden such that a greater pathological burden is required to show an effect on cognition among persons with more education.”

Catherine M. Roe, Ph.D., and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, studied 37 individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type and 161 individuals without dementia between 2003 and 2008. Participants reported their education history and took cognitive tests. They were injected with a marker known as carbon 11–labeled Pittsburgh Compound B ([11C]PiB) and then underwent a 60-minute positron emission tomography (PET) scan of the brain. Recent studies have shown that [11C]PiB adheres to beta-amyloid brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, allowing researchers to identify these characteristics of the disease in living patients.

The level of [11C]PiB uptake interacted significantly with years of education in predicting cognitive test scores. Among individuals whose brains took up higher levels of [11C]PiB, indicating the presence of beta-amyloid plaques, performance on the test increased with increasing education levels. Education was not associated with cognitive scores among those with low [11C]PiB uptake, indicating no plaques.

“The results support the hypothesis that cognitive reserve influences the association between Alzheimer disease pathological burden and cognition,” the authors write. “Based on autopsy data, there may be a ceiling effect when extensive beta-amyloid pathological burden is present as in late-stage dementia of the Alzheimer type. Presumably, as the Alzheimer disease pathological burden increases, a greater proportion of highly educated participants reaches the threshold for dementia and the initial advantage provided by cognitive reserve decreases. Longitudinal imaging of beta-amyloid pathology in vivo will soon allow us to determine whether these inferences from cross-sectional studies are accurate.”

Reference: Arch Neurol. 2008;65[11]:1467-1471