1:38 PM: That’s it for our live blog today- Peter Delahunt will start the live blogging tomorrow morning at 8 AM for Day 2 coverage.  We hope you enjoyed the live blog and that you’ll be back tomorrow!

1:35 PM: Elkhonon Goldberg is the Chief Scientific Advisor to SharpBrains. He begins by discussing the role of the frontal lobes in decision-making, especially in new and novel situations. He talks about how the frontal lobes and right hemisphere seem to be more highly impacted by aging effects. As we age, we encounter fewer and fewer novel situations, so those parts of the brains get out of practice.

The focus thus far on brain fitness programs has been heavily on working memory, but his “wish list” would be for people to include more exercises that target planning and decision-making, to combat these frontal lobe declines.

1:23 PM: Michael Cole is the CEO of Vivity. They are behind the website fitbrains.com. FitBrains focuses on a structure that ties together activity, awareness, and motivation. The research is based on Paul Nussbaum’s five pillars of brain health. There is a variety of games available online. There are no studies published on the programs yet, but pilot studies are in process with collaborating universities.

The goal of the company is to bring brain fitness into the mainstream. They aim to get people to integrate brain fitness into daily life activities through a variety of channels.

Next up: Elkhonon Goldberg

1:07 PM: Dan Michel is the CEO of Dakim. He says we need to take a proactive role in our own health and brain health to enhance our quality of life. If we don’t, the risk to our culture, society, and economy are significant.

Dakim offers an integrated touch-screen appliance most commonly used in residential communities. The model is for people to use the program long term, sometimes for as many as thousands of session. Dan Michel shares a lot of stories and anecdotes about people’s positive experiences with the program and how it improves the lives of residents to help them live more independently. The program includes goal-setting and score components, which Michel feels is key to helping people stay motivated. A direct-to-consumer product is forthcoming in 2010.

Regarding audience questions about scientific studies, Michel said there is a study from UCLA forthcoming.

Next up: Michael Cole

12:50 PM: Liz (Elizabeth) Zelinski is a researcher from USC who led the IMPACT Study, which showed the efficacy of cognitive training. IMPACT was conducted with the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program. Dr. Zelinski and colleague Glenn Smith (Mayo Clinic) did not expect to get what the company was looking for or to see positive impacts before starting the study. They accepted because of the excellent study design. IMPACT It’s the largest randomized controlled trial of a cognitive training product.

487 high-functioning participants were randomized to experimental and control conditions. The study has one of the top ratings for clinical design and trial methods. For those who did the experimental training, improvements were found in tasks that were practiced, which is not too surprising, but more interestingly significant improvement in auditory recall which was not trained. Working memory recall was also improved but not trained. Experimental participants reported increased cognitive sharpness whereas the control participants did not. In a 3 month follow-up performance had maintained and in cases improved further.

There have been several published studies observing improvement in “transfer tasks” – meaning improvement on tasks other than those that were specifically trained. Commonalities in these studies are extended practice, difficulty of tasks, and adaptive approach. Dr. Zelinski’s opinion is that speeded and complex auditory training is key to improving recall. The limitations of the study are that the improvements are seen only in the same sensory modality that was trained (eg all auditory). This is shown in IMPACT and other studies. In the IMPACT study the training worked for healthy, motivated adults. The subjects were between 65 and 93 and the effects were similar in men and women.

What’s next now that they know the training works? They need to study optimal training time, the duration of the benefits, and whether booster training will sustain the benefits. The important thing is to keep people motivated and doing the training – avoiding what she calls “the Bowflex problem”- buying the program and not actually doing it.

Next up: Dan Michel

12:28 PM: Kunal Sarkar is the CEO of Lumos Labs which operates the website Lumosity.com. Lumosity offers brain games delivered through the web. They have “strong grounding” in research with studies underway on the effectiveness of the games. The games have a social interaction component and are also offered on mobile devices such as the iPhone and Palm Pre. In the beginning, younger folks were attracted to the games but they have increased market share among baby boomers. Lumosity.com now ranks among the top 5,000 sites online. They also offer sites in French and Spanish.

Joe Hardy begins talking about the research. (Disclosure: Joe worked at Posit Science for several years before moving to Lumos Labs.) Lumosity offers a platform for research as opposed to doing the research in-house. They aim to foster a community of brain fitness researchers doing projects they are interested in. The games are online and fun to play,with easily accessible data from training. An example of research is a study on girls with Turner Syndrome, who suffer math and memory deficits. The researchers created a group of games to focus on the specific cognitive deficits. Behavioral and functional assessments showed improvements in math and memory in the study group.

Audience question: What science claims can you make and what can customers expect from using your product? {Kunal} Customers misunderstand what our brain training can do. Their expectations are too high, believing for example that they can reduce their likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s which has not been proven. In Lumosity’s marketing they don’t make links between training and Alzheimer’s. They only make claims tied to the research they have done but nothing further.

Audience question: Would you be supportive of a study that pitted you against a competitor like Posit Science or CogniFit? {Kunal} They have not been approached with this idea. They are open to the idea but concerned about how a study could possibly be structured and what outcomes measures would be used. It would be comparing 2 different things so it’s tricky but they would be open to it. {Alvaro} The question was from a researcher in Toronto who very well may approach Lumosity with a research proposal of this sort in the very near future.

Audience question: The Turner Syndrome study cited was open-label and had no active control- what do you make of that criticism and what other studies are being done? {Joe} Fair question; the Turner study was more of a pilot study but the researcher is following up with a second controlled study. There is a variety of studies in progress, some of which are controlled and some which are open-label.

Next up: Elizabeth Zelinski

12:04 PM: The Summit is resuming. The next panel includes:

• Kunal Sarkar, CEO, Lumos Labs
• Elizabeth Zelinski, Professor at USC Davis School of Gerontology
• Dan Michel, CEO, Dakim
• Michael Cole, CEO, Vivity Labs
• Elkhonon Goldberg, NYU/ SharpBrains

The topic is “Baby Boomers and Beyond: Maintaining Cognitive Vitality. First up: Kunal Sarkar.

11:30 AM: The driving session has concluded. The Summit is taking a break for lunch, but we’ll live blog at least one more session this afternoon. After the break, the topic will be “Baby Boomers and Beyond: Maintaining Cognitive Vitality”. It’s slated to start at noon but since the conference has been behind a bit all day we’ll update if the time changes.

11:28 AM: Peter Christianson is the President of Young Drivers of Canada. Young drivers has spent 35 years and trained over 1 million drivers and couldn’t figure out why some drivers still failed their driving tests and were involved in crashes. In 2003, it was shown that physiological changes in teens may account for recklessness, risk taking, rule breaking, and emotional outbursts. Young Drivers realized that teen drivers didn’t have all of the cognitive resources to be good drivers so in 2003 they began distributing CogniFit products to the driving students.

Usually teen drivers need 2 years experience driving to become experienced and more safe; Young Drivers thought that CogniFit brain exercises could help speed up this process. Young Drivers now offers a combination of cognitive assessments, CogniFit training exercises, and in-car training with licensed instructors. The exercises focus on the 10 driving-related skills discussed by Shlomo Breznitz in the previous presentation. The results show that this is helping teen drivers drive more safely and reduce crash risk. There is a Traffic Injury Research Foundation study in progress to validate the positive effects of this combination training. They are starting a similar program targeting senior drivers in Canada.

11:12 AM: Shlomo Breznitz is the founder of CogniFit. The company doesn’t focus on driving; on the contrary their products address a wide variety of applications. Breznitz says that prior speaker Steven Aldrich made a great case for the importance of driving to quality of life, and there is hardly anything in our daily lives that tests the brain as much as driving. The relationship between age and motor fatalities is shown clearly- very young and very old drivers are the most likely to suffer a fatal car crash. Males are about twice as likely as females to crash.

10 skills are involved in driving- ufov, changing plans, speed and distance assessment, eye-hand coordination, confidence, short-term memory, response time, focus, visual scanning, and divided attention. Breznitz says that ufov is important, but it isn’t everything; attention is another big issue related to safe driving, as well as appropriate confidence in your own abilities. Young drivers and old drivers are both over-confident but for different reasons. In older drivers, over-confidence is a result of a time lag between the reduction of cognitive ability and a realistic awareness of the level of decline.

CogniFit did a study with Young Drivers of Canada using a multi-domain cognitive assessment as a way to predict crash risk. The students were tested before and after training on exercises. Some measures of driving-related cognitive abilities were enhanced post-training. Breznitz thinks having a marketplace with a variety of scientifically-validated products is better for consumers because different exercises are better for different purposes- and it can only benefit the consumer to have more choices.

Next up: Peter Christianson

10:52 AM: Steven Aldrich is the Posit Science CEO. He’ll be discussing how we get these new tools (that Jerri Edwards spoke about) into the marketplace. He starts with Posit Science goals to help people think faster, focus better, and remember more with proven science (30+ published studies on the benefits of Posit Science technology).

What are the goals for driving safety among baby boomers? In the U.S. driving is universal and critical to life. Controlling for other factors, you are 4-6x more likely to die if you stop driving. The goal is to keep people driving as safely and for as long as possible. Reported crashes involve ~12MM cars per year and NTSA estimates the true number is twice that high- the cost in dollars and human lives is enormous. As the population ages things are going to get worse, not better- so we need to take action. Insurers, employers, the government, consumer advocacy groups, and consumers themselves are all motivated to contribute to the issue of improving driver safety and reducing crash risk among older drivers.

Posit Science has 3 products, 2 of which address driving via visual processing speed exercises and which include the UFOV training that Jerri Edwards tested. In addition to the scientific data there are many stories and anecdotes about improved driving and quality of life from using the products. But how to distribute it? Through forward-looking insurers like Allstate, State Farm, UPMC, and Capital Health, as well as through consumer-focused partners like PBS, NPR, QVC, Amazon. Brain training that includes ufov is a solution to the problem and needs to be distributed through multiple channels to consumers and stakeholders.

Audience question: What’s the difference between InSight and DriveSharp? InSight contains 5 exercises- the 2 that are in DriveSharp plus 3 others that work on different parts of visual processing. InSight also contains ~4x the creative content of DriveSharp, it’s a more in depth product.

Audience question: Some feel Posit Science products are too expensive, so what are you doing to bring them into the hands of more people? We are trying to reduce the costs and work with more partners to get this done. The insurance relationships are one positive way to increase cost-effective distribution, because the insurers bear the cost and the insured can benefit from the products. The fixed costs of creating and testing the products is high since they are complex and scientifically validated.

Next up: Shlomo Breznitz

10:33 AM: Jerri Edwards is a researcher at the University of South Florida who studies driving and cognitive training. Among older drivers, cognitive processing is a good predictor of driving ability. Specifically useful field of view (peripheral vision) is a key measure. With age our useful field of view (ufov) shrinks and makes it harder to drive safely. Studies show that poor performance on a ufov test predicts higher crash risk. If you train to improve ufov performance you can reduce crash risk.

Dr. Edwards conducted randomized controlled studies on ufov exercises. The results showed that exercises improving ufov reduces driving cessation (thereby increasing driving mobility) by 40%. 3 years later they also showed that people who had done the ufov training drove more often and farther and that they made fewer dangerous maneuvers and reduced crash risk. The exercises she tested are now marketed as the “Road Tour” exercise in Posit Science’s InSight and DriveSharp software. People who trained on memory tasks did not show the same results as the ufov-trained participants.

She draws the following conclusions from her research: 1) cognitive abilities are the best predictor of older drivers’ performance; 2) older adults’ cognitive performance can be increased with ufov training; 3) ufov training improves cognitive performance for up to 5 years; and 4) ufov training translates to improved driving and mobility.

Next up: Steven Aldrich, Posit Science CEO

10:12 AM: The conference has resumed and Alvaro Fernandez announces the panel for this next group.

• Jerri Edwards, Assoc. Professor University of South Florida
• Steven Aldrich, CEO, Posit Science
• Shlomo Breznitz, President, CogniFit
• Peter Christianson, President of Young Drivers of Canada

Jerri Edwards will get started.

9:55 AM: P. Murali Doraiswamy from Duke University begins with an introduction of his day-to-day work. He is a biological psychologist and a clinician who works with seniors. He also runs a clinic to test a variety of products (including pharma and cognitive fitness) for mood and memory disorders. He feels there are significant gaps in care for mental illness and dementia, and patients increasingly prefer to be off pharmaceuticals in favor of non-invasive, non-drug treatments involving things like physical exercise and brain fitness.

He is very concerned that there are no official guidelines for cognitive screening or brain fitness intervention tools which outline the appropriate outcomes measures and testing protocol. He feels that research that shows real-world benefits is key to the success of the brain fitness field. One example of how this has NOT worked in the past is with the tests done on Alzheimer’s drugs- Doraiswamy says they were tested with extremely sensitive outcomes measures which ultimately don’t translate to actually helping people with the symptoms of the disease.

Dr. Doraiswamy is hopeful for brain assessments becoming more routine, but cites the issue of doctors being “dinosaurs” and not wanting to change their method or actions. It’s important to change since depression, memory decline, etc. affect quality of life as much or more than other health measures.

After a 10 minute break, we’ll reconvene for the next panel at 10:05 AM. The topic is “Tools for Safer Driving: The Opportunity with Teenagers and Adults”.

9:43 AM: Bill Reichman is from Baycrest and the University of Toronto. He starts by talking about well-being in older age being dependent on financial security, autonomy, independence, health status, activity, and social bonds. He states that “we must do for brain health in the 21st century what we did for cardiovascular health in the 20th century.” This means looking at the brain throughout life as opposed to focusing on end-of-life brain failure. Projected increases in age-related dementia and cognitive decline opens the door for the field of neuroplasticity-based brain fitness to grow. Baycrest looks at attention and concentration, executive functioning, and memory as the main targets for brain fitness. They serve ~2500 seniors a day at the first Canadian center for brain fitness. The current focus is assessments for stroke patients, healthy aging, and seniors in residential facilities, as well as caregiver support.

Reichman advocates that brain exercise begin in childhood and be scientifically validated. He advocates for private/public partnerships as a very effective way to deliver brain fitness to people.

Next up: P Murali Doraiswamy from Duke University

9:23 AM: David Whitehouse from OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions is beginning. He starts by discussing the current state of genetic and neuropsychological assessments- the tests are difficult and expensive. Working with a company in Australia called Brain Resource, they have developed a comprehensive, integrated, standardized database of brain assessments. This helps with detecting patterns based on the results of a web-based neuropsychological tests. I.e., performance on the neuropsych test predicts fMRI and genetic results.

Since all brain illnesses include a “negativity bias”, it’s easy to do a preliminary screening for folks who are well and not well. They can give a 10-15 minute web-based test and remove the well people from the system at that point. The others are given a longer and more complex neuropsych test. The results of that are cross-referenced with the database to predict diagnosis and treatment. This is a big deal because our current healthcare system can’t handle individualized patient care on the level required to treat everyone. Standardizing and simplifying assessments of this nature help ease the burden while remaining current and easily adaptable based on new research. You can deliver customized web-based education, motivation, and goal-setting tools that address emotion, thinking, feeling, and self-regulation.

Next up: Bill Reichman

9:02 AM: Next session- Cognition and Neuroplasticity: The New Health & Wellness Frontier. Participants are:

• Alvaro Fernandez, CEO, SharpBrains
• Tom Warden, Asst. VP, Allstate Research and Planning Center
• David Whitehouse, Chief Medical Officer, OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions
• William Reichman, President, Baycrest
• P Murali Doraiswamy, Biological Psychiatry Division Head, Duke University

Tom Warden from Allstate is starting to talk about his experience using Posit Science software with older drivers. Talks about the many things over the years Allstate has promoted to encourage safer driving- seat belts, airbags, etc. Now looking at brain fitness as the next frontier. Allstate has conducted a pilot of the Posit Science software utilizing useful field of view exercises invented by Karlene Ball. Warden says that Posit Science software is the only one scientifically proven to increase useful field of view and shown to reduce crash risk by 50%. Allstate tested the program in Pennsylvania with good results in the older drivers and now want to try to figure out how to expand the program to younger drivers, and to encourage usage among the older drivers. Allstate was pleased with the pilot program and long term they think that cognitive training will play a large role in driving safety- but they’ll need to figure out how to get more people adopting the program.

Audience question: What are the different plans for helping older and younger drivers? Warden says that younger drivers are by far the most dangerous on the road, followed by older drivers (controlling for other factors). Younger drivers are inexperienced, less risk-averse, and have trouble focusing. Warden is unsure of the best way to employ cognitive training for teens. Right now their methods are to raise awareness of the risks of alcohol and text messaging as related to driving.

Audience question: How are you going to measure real world benefits of the program? Warden says they’ve been comparing participants to claims made and found that those who used the software make fewer claims (ie have fewer accidents) as compared to a control group. One problem with this is they are not capturing small unreported accidents. Still working on longer term plans to deepen the research.

Next up: David Whitehouse

8:40 AM: Dr. Diamond is doing a review of her research from the 1960s to the present. From her many years of research she has come up with 5 things that are key to a healthy brain development throughout life: 1. Diet 2. Exercise 3. Challenge 4. Newness 5. Love.

1. Diet: Experiment cited- Rats who were given low protein diets during gestation followed by high protein during feeding and weaning  yielded 5-9% growth in dendrite branching.

2. Exercise: Rats in an enriched motor environment showed increased dendrite branching in the motor cortex and perform better.

3. Challenge: The brain needs to be challenged which is why crossword puzzles don’t help your brain fitness. Rats who face obstacles to food cups increase brain size compared to rats who could easily reach food.

4. Newness: Rat studies show that if you have a challenging task you have to change the object… animals and humans alike become bored with the same stimuli and it ceases to affect the brain.

5. Love: 600-day-old rats were dying in Diamond’s lab, but rats in a German lab were living to be 800 days old. How? Diamond and colleagues started to pet the 600-day-old rats throughout the rest of their lives and they lived to be over 900 days old. Post-mortem autopsy showed increased brain size in the enriched and petted (loved) rats.

In closing,  “the brain can demonstrate plasticity at any age.”

8:30 AM: Alvaro Fernandez welcomed everyone and introduced Marian Diamond. He said 120 participants are logged in to participate in the conference.

Twitter users: the hashtag for the SharpBrains Summit is #sharp2010 – if you want to follow along on Twitter. We’ll be focusing on live blogging, but other folks are sure to be tweeting on that hashtag.

8:22 AM: We got into the virtual meeting room, and happy to see that we haven’t missed anything as they are running late! Marian Diamond will now begin her introductory talk at 8:30 AM. That will most likely push all of the agenda items back by 30 minutes.

8:15 AM: We’re having some trouble with the login page. The links aren’t live. Thanks to some tips from Twitter users, we’re trying to connect now. Apologies for the delay.

8:00 AM: Good morning! Today we”ll be live blogging the SharpBrains Summit. The Summit is a 2 day virtual conference hosted by Alvaro Fernandez and features a variety of experts from the field of brain fitness.

First up we have Dr. Marian Diamond, a Professor of Neuroscience and Anatomy at UC Berkeley. Her introductory talk is entitled “My Continued Love Affair with the Brain”. Dr. Diamond is one of the world’s top neuroscience researchers and has written several books on a variety of brain-related topics.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Why Would An Older Driver Run A Red Light?
2. More Good News: Brain Training Cuts Crash Risk in Half
3. Live Blogging the SharpBrains Summit – Day 2
4. DriveSharp: Proven To Help Keep You Safe On The Road