Dr. Robert Myers describes some activities that can help a child deal with ADHD in his article,5 Simple Concentration Building Techniques for Kids with ADHD:

“As a child psychologist and the father of a son with ADHD, I developed a host of exercises that help ADHD kids improve their concentration. The key is presenting them as games that are actually fun for parents and children to do together.

…For older children and adolescents, check out the cognitive exercises provided by Lumosity.”

One of his recommendations is to practice relaxation and positive imagery. For example,

“ADHD kids can “imagine” that they’re paying attention in class or able to handle teasing, and this can in turn change their behavior at school.”

I believe that regular physical exercise can also help children (or adults) control ADHD. Instead of rushing into stimulant prescriptions, perhaps it’s worth trying some of these fun and harmless behavioral interventions.

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(We’ll have an easy way to purchase this Lumosity shirt soon.)

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Path Finder is based on the classic test of executive function, Trail Making, Part B. You can also try a larger version of Path Finder in the Warm Ups section of Lumosity. The average time to complete this version is 34 seconds (the typical time to complete the smaller version above is shorter).

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NY Times: Exercise Your Brain, or Else You’ll…Uh…, by Katie Hafner.

Yahoo! Tech: Brain Game Can Boost IQ…, by Christopher Null.

BC Gaming: Game Review: Lumosity, by Alexandria Jackson.

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There is some new evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is much more likely for people whose parents both have the neurodegenerative disorder than if only one parent has it. Researchers examined families in which both parents have Alzheimer’s, and found that their children ended up with the disease 42% of the time.

This finding supports the evidence that genes play an important role in determining whether you end up with Alzheimer’s. One of the genetic components responsible for the disease is known as the gene Apolipoprotein E (ApoE). Fortunately your genes do not entirely determine your fate. Your lifestyle is important too, and although we do not have control of our genetic makeup, we can control how we live. With the proper cognitive and physical exercise, brain food, and even attitude toward life, one can better buffer their brain from later years of cognitive decline and delay the risk of dementia.

The incidence of Alzheimer’s increases with age, and is typically diagnosed after the age of 65. By then, there’s not much you can do to slow the disease. So what can you do earlier to help your chances of preserving cognitive function? For me personally, I have been implementing some of the brain health tips on this blog, as well as training my brain with Lumosity, as part of my daily routine. This is not just to practice what I preach, but rather to address a concern I have when I constantly need to remind my parents about certain things, such as taking their meds. I’d rather start my cognitive training regimen early so that when I someday reach my parents’ age my brain will be in the best condition it can be.

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General intelligence is correlated with good rhythm.

Fredrik Ullen and a team of researchers in Sweden found that people who most accurately tap out a beat also do the best on intelligence tests. They suggest that the brain’s sense of timing might underlie higher intellectual functions. The paper was published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

From the press release on physorg:

“It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving,” says Fredrik Ullén at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. “Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity.”

According to Fredrik Ullén, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests.

“We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes,” he says.

They also found differences in the anatomy of the prefrontal cortex - a part of your brain involved in many complex cognitive tasks. The subjects with good rhythmic accuracy and intelligence had more white matter volume in the prefrontal cortex.

As is common with an interesting result, this study prompts many new questions:

Does this correlation arise out of a difference in noisiness at the neuronal level, as the release suggests? Or do keeping time and intelligence both arise from higher level cognitive processes, like attention and working memory?

Can intelligence be altered by improving rhythm? Is Ringo Starr actually the smartest in the band?

More white matter in the prefrontal cortex implies more myelin, which aids in fast and reliable communication between neurons. Does the additional myelination improve communication between neurons to the point that rhythm and intelligence are both enhanced?

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Different languages are represented differently across the brain. This is especially true for languages that are very dissimilar, such as English and Chinese. English is learned from pronouncing its 26-letter alphabet, whereas to learn the Chinese language, one needs to memorize thousands of characters in order to understand a string of pictographs.

Dyslexia, a learning disability that causes difficulty in reading and writing, affects the brain in different ways according to language. Professor Li-Hai Tan, along with his research team from the University of Hong Kong, discovered that Chinese-speaking dyslexics have a different pattern of brain activity than English-speaking dyslexics. Professor Tan told Lumos Labs that “the left middle frontal gyrus, rather than the posterior brain regions, is a perpetrator of reading disorders in Chinese, suggesting the possibility that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese reading would not be in alphabetic language reading, and vice versa.” One implication is that different interventions may be more or less suitable depending on language. 

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Recently, U.S. News did their cover story on Keeping Your Brain Fit. As you the readers might already know, there are ways to thwart the cognitive decline that often comes with aging, but there is no silver bullet that works every time for each person. It is possible to slow down the progression by eating the right foods, exercising regularly, and playing brain training games – all of which are beneficial in keeping your brain fit and healthy. Although the article highlights its share of critics who prefers one activity over the other, your brain lasts longest with a healthy combination of brain healthy activity. Research has also shown that mental decline begins as early as in the third decade of life, so it would be wise for even young adults to work towards a healthy brain early to help avoid ‘losing it’ later.

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The article does offer some hope:

“…notes Richard Suzman, Ph.D., director of the NIA’s Behavioral and Social Research Program. ‘Research is now beginning to suggest that interventions – such as controlling hypertension and diabetes or perhaps cognitive training – might help maintain or improve mental abilities with age. As such interventions are tested and widely applied, we should be able to track their impact through this type of research.’”

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Movies like Being John Malkovich are based on the idea that one might be able to experience what another human’s mind is visualizing. Most would think that such movies are pure fantasy and science fiction, but researchers at U.C. Berkeley are one step closer to making this a reality.

Using a computational model calibrated to each individual subject, Professor Jack Gallant and his research team were able to use brain activity (measured with fMRI) to identify which of a large set of images was seen by a subject. Importantly, none of the images in the set had been previously seen by the subject, demonstrating the ability to generalize to novel situations. Though performance isn’t yet perfect, it’s impressive. Accuracy ranges from 80% when viewing 1,000 images, to 90% accuracy when viewing 120 images.

Dr. Gallant said, “there may theoretically be sufficient information available to decode memory, imagery and dreams some day, but it will likely be many decades before this is really possible.”

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