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The Amazing Brain Train

A playful way to do a little brain training using games: “Fueled by your mental energy, Professor Fizzwizzle’s Brain Train will take you on a brain-boosting adventure!

Put your mighty mind to the test and see how far you can go!”

15 online games for training your brain in planning, memory, spatial reasoning and numbers all for $6.99 or free for 24-hours.  For a quick look check out this video.

Right Words Boost Infants’ Mental Development

One question new parents ask is what natural things can I do to stimulate the development of my baby’s brain and make them smarter?  There are number of very simple things that have good scientific evidence behind them.  For example,  new research from Northwestern University confirms that talking to your baby accelerates their cognitive development. Using the right words improves their ability to categorize objects.

It has long been held that talking to your baby is good for mental development but the Northwestern research found that this is so for the very young, only 2-4 months.  The researchers write:

“We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorization,” said Waxman, a co-author and professor of psychology. “We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning.”

Hearing object-correlated words influences  infants’ cognition even in the first few months of life! The key is to clearly use “real words” or ones that properly pick out objects.

It is not clear what the longer term brain-boosting advantages of this are but the ability to categorize is fundamental to how we think.

To get started you may want to check out the talking pointers from the Center for Early Literacy.     If you use this technique, or others to boost your baby’s brain development, please share your experience with other readers by leaving a comment.

Vitamin D May Speed Brain Information Processing

We get vitamin D mainly from the sun’s UV rays, fatty fish, fortified milk or cereals  and supplements like a multi-vitamin.  D has been in the news lately because there are widespread deficiencies and growing evidence that it supports brain development in children and improved processing speeds in older adults. But the situation is far from conclusive. As recently reported by the Dana Foundation in Vitamin D and the Brain: More Good News,

Vitamin D has many roles in regulating brain health, from aiding the development of the brain and nervous system to postponing decline toward the end of life, according to a growing body of research. R. Douglas Shytle and Paula C. Bickford review the field and argue that while it is clear that many people worldwide experience vitamin D deficiency, we need to complete much more research to fully understand the consequences of this deficiency for brain health.

And the research is underway. Watch for additional posts on the importance of D for improving cognitive performance on the Next Brain Blog.

Source: Vitamin D Image

Does Listening to Classical Music Increase IQ?

I get this question a lot. It goes back to the craze around the Mozart Effect or the idea you can get smart by listening to Mozart’s music.  As far as I can tell there is no (or little) scientific evidence to support the idea. There is some evidence however that listening may temporarily (10-15 min)  improve your spatial reasoning skills.

More relevant for readers of the next Brain Blog is the growing evidence that learning to play a musical instrument can improve many cognitive skills and perhaps raise IQ.    Scans reveal musician’s brains look different and they tend to score higher on standardized tests for spatial-temporal tasks, verbal memory and even math. One study suggested a small increase in IQ of children taking music lessons.

As learning to play a musical instrument brings intrinsic satisfaction, it may be a particularly good option for building YourNextBrain! Interested to hear from reader with brain boosting experiences related to learning an instrument.

Source: Image of brain and sheet music