Improvement Goals

Playing Scrabble Can Boost Visual Cognition 20%!

Competitive scrabble players are able to recognize words 20% faster than non scrabble players according to new research from the University of Calgary. More importantly, they found it enhances the cognition you use to recognize words:

“The average literate adult relies on three components to process and read a word: sound, spelling and meaning,” says Penny Pexman, professor of Psychology. “When we studied the Scrabble players, we found that there is significant flexibility in the tools they use to read words and that it can include the orientation of the word as well.”

Playing games is one well-known strategy for improving brain function and cognitive performance.  Many posts on the Next Brain Blog cover the topic. Trouble is skills developed by game playing are often margin improvements and don’t transfer into new domains. That makes the finding about play Scrabble significant – 20% improvement and it transfers!

I am interested to hear from readers that are getting significant and transferable brain boosts from other games.

Build a Better Brain by Consciously Listening

The listening and sound expert Julian Treasure has an excellent 8 minute TED Talk video on why we are losing our ability to listen and what to do about it.  Of special interest to readers of the Next Brain Blog are the five techniques he offers to improve your ability to listen consciously.  These include:

1. Actively listen to others by practicing RASA or receive, appreciate, summarize and ask questions.
2. Enjoy 3 minutes of silence or quiet per day to help reset or re-calibrate your listening.
3. Count the channels or sources of sound in a noisy environment. For example, walking down a city street you receive sound from a dozen sources including car horns, nearby conversation,  buses and so on.
4. Change your listen position by adjusting the filters that shape how you hear including for example, expectations and empathy.
5. Listen to the hidden choir around you. This involves savoring ordinary sounds, for example hearing the symphony in your tumble dryer.

These five techniques are simple but practicing them will with time transform how you consciously listen. Hearing the world is a key to improved cognitive performance.

Interested to hear from readers that practice specific techniques of conscious listening. What techniques do you use? What have you heard that the rest of have not?

Use Your Finger to Crank Your Brain

I read faster from paper than I do on a computer screen. With paper I can use my finger to guide my eyes. A well-known speed reading technique, guiding and pacing, lowers the load on your visual system and helps avoid skipping back and other distractions. It is simple and it works.  Try it out.

With practice you can drop your finger and still get the effect because your eyes have been retrained.  I get some of this effect but am still fastest with good comprehension when I use my finger.

This is just one of the techniques covered in the excellent book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Speed Reading.

If you don’t already use these techniques, several weeks of practice will produce a big jump in you reading speed and will likely improve comprehension as well.

Reading speed is important. The difference between a slow reader and an excellent reader means 3 books per week if you read an hour a day.

Very interested to hear from readers that have simple techniques (e.g. use of your finger) to crank your reading speed or other cognitive performances.

Hard Evidence that Meditation Changes our Brains

Mediation and mindfulness training is a frequent topic on the Next Brain Blog.  Over the last several years we have seen studies that show a few weeks of meditation can produce measurable improvement in cognitive function and long-term practice actually makes certain brain regions larger. Now researchers at UCLA report in, Is Meditation the Push-Up for The Brain?:

“… that people who meditate also have stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. Having stronger connections influences the ability to rapidly relay electrical signals in the brain. And significantly, these effects are evident throughout the entire brain, not just in specific areas.”

Changing the physical structure of the brain to preserve and enhance function and cognitive performance makes meditation a high-value training technique.

Interested to hear from readers that use any form of meditation. What technique do you use? How long have your practice? What Next Brain benefits do you see?

Laughter Primes Creative Problem Solving

The health benefits of regular laughter are broadly known.  Check out Laughter is the Best Medicine for a quick review.

What is not so widely known, is that laughter can also immediately boost brain function and cognitive performance, especially in the area of creativity.  For example, one study showed that watching 15-minute comedy video leaves you in a significantly more hopeful state.  Being hopeful enables creative thinking.

Being open to laughter, generating chuckles and getting the full effects from a good laugh are all skills we can learn.  One recent trend in this area is Laughter Yoga.   In this approach you practice an exercise that combines laughing for no specific reason with Yoga-based breathing techniques.  Not sure if it achieves the same effects as traditional laughter but it appears to. Perhaps it is even better!

Check out this video from the BBC on Laughter Yoga in London and you be the judge.

Interested to hear from readers that do laughter yoga or use other techniques to induce laughter on a regular basis for the purposes of health and improved cognitive performance.

What is Your Brain Performance Index?

Lumosity, a leader in the growing field of cognitive training, has introduced the brain performance index.  The index is an empirical and comparative measure of your ability to focus and sustain attention, processing speed, memory, problem solving skill and mental flexibility.  You can set up an account and build your profile for free. If you want to know how you compare to others in your age group you need to subscribe.

Like other instruments that assess your cognitive abilities, the brain performance index (BPI)  gives insights into strengths and weaknesses. It should help you define goals for working on your next brain.

Interested to hear from readers that use the BPI or other assessment instruments to set goals for how best to achieve peak cognitive performance.

Student Reading Skill Doubles in 24 Days

Scientific learning just published the results of a controlled study on Fast ForWord Reading Level 1. This is brain training software  designed to boost the abilities of early readers such as students in first and second grade. It build skills with phonemes (sounds) and images, vocabulary knowledge and decoding and sequencing skills and even motivation for reading.

In the study over 200 first and second graders trained 48 minutes per day for 24 school days. When tested against a control group they scored nearly twice as well.

An impressive result especially since it is focused on the fundamental skill of phonological awareness. This involves recognizing, taking apart, adding and moving sounds. It supports high performance in both reading and writing.

Interested to hear from others that use specific techniques to build reading skills in children.

Mental Training at the Edge but Not Over

One reason video games are addictive is that the difficulty of play is automatically adjusted by how well you do. If you are scoring low the game becomes easier by dropping you down a level. Likewise if game play is too easy, the level of difficult increases and you are faced with a greater challenge.  By dynamically adjusting the difficultly of play, you are always operating at “the edge of your seat” (or ability) and experience a rich sense of challenge and accomplishment.

It seems that the same effect can improve brain training at least in older adults. Research reported by the Beckman Institute for Advance Science and Technology found that older adults stay engaged when the intellectual demands of a task optimally match their abilities. Furthermore they found that completing such tasks produced cognitive benefits.

“Stine-Morrow said that engagement in activities that are neither too easy nor too difficult, but push at the boundaries of one’s skill level, produces the highly pleasurable experience known as flow and that the experience of flow may be an important pathway through which older adults can stave off the declines in fluid ability that sometimes accompany aging.”

Intellectually challenging tasks include for example taking a class or reading. The key is to pick the one that keeps you in the optimal balance between challenge and reward. While the research is focused on older adults I suspect the effect works well at all ages.

I am interested to hear from readers that are able to brain train at the edge but not over.  How do you adjust the difficulty level?

Source of Image:  The Edge

Can Pulsed Light-and-Sound Enhance Your Brain?

The idea behind mind machines is intriguing. They are simple devices that use pulsed sound and light to trick your brainwaves into certain patterns and put you in specific mental states such as relaxation or alertness. The question is do they really work?

There is some scientific evidence that brainwave entrainment can have a therapeutic impact.  There are a handful of small companies that manufacture and have sold mind machines for decades. Yet they remain on the fringe.

While I am not endorsing any specific product or company, you can learn more by checking out this video by the folks at Mind Alive.  One of their mind machines (pictured to the right) runs about $500.

In the video they talk about how this technology delivers a “made to order mental state”. They also emphasize that given its ability to help manage stress it should be in every home.  Perhaps if we had an iPhone or Droid app that turns a smart phone into a mind machine that will happen.

Very interested to hear from readers that use some form of mind machine. How long have you used it? What effects does it produce?

Expand Working Memory – Your Brain’s Bandwidth

Working memory holds the contents of what we are paying attention to at any one time.  It is a small active memory store that provides the information we process when thinking, making decisions, solving problems and performing other cognitive tasks.   Working memory is like your conscious brain’s bandwidth, it is a measure of the amount of information that can be processed at any one time.  The more bandwidth the higher your cognitive performance.

Research has shown that simple training tasks can expand our working memory and increase fluid intelligence or our reasoning and problem solving capabilities.

The training, called the n-back technique, presents you with a series of sounds or pictures.   In the case where n = 2 you want to identify the sound or image that is just like the second one in the series. Once you master that you move up to n = 3 and identify the sound or image that is just like the third one in the series. As the value of n increases you must hold more and more information in your working memory. This exercises it like a muscle.

Doing n-back training for 20 minutes a day for 20 days produces a measurable improvement in reasoning and problem solving power.   And it seems the level of improvement you get increases with the amount of training you do.  According to research presented at the May 28th American Association for Psychological Science Meeting:

“These new studies demonstrate that the more training people have on the dual n-back task, the greater the improvement in fluid intelligence,” Jonides said.

They also found the effect works for children as well as adults and that single n-back training (focusing on the images OR the sounds) works as well as dual n-back training (focusing on the images AND the sounds).

N-back training is a perfect technique for a iPhone or mobile app. Unfortunately, I cannot find one.   To get the technique a try, go to this free web-based application. To dig a bit more you might want to try The Brain Workshop but you have to download software to your computer.

Interested to hear from readers that do n-back training.  What value of n have you reached? How has this type of training impacted your cognitive performance in everyday or professional tasks?

Source for Image: Working Memory