Training the Older Brain in 3-D: Video Game Enhances Cognitive Control

Scientists at UC San Francisco are reporting that they have found a way to reverse some of the negative effects of aging on the brain, using a video game designed to improve cognitive control.

The findings, published on Sept. 5 in Nature, show that a specially designed 3-D video game can improve cognitive performance in healthy older adults, they said. The researchers said the study provides a measure of scientific support to the burgeoning field of brain fitness, which has been criticized for lacking evidence that such training can induce lasting and meaningful changes.

In the game, which was developed by the UCSF researchers, participants race a car around a winding track while a variety of road signs pop up. Drivers are instructed to keep an eye out for a specific type of sign, while ignoring all the rest, and to press a button whenever that particular sign appears. The need to switch rapidly from driving to responding to the signs – i.e. multitasking – generates interference in the brain that undermines performance. The researchers found that this interference increases dramatically across the adult lifespan.

But after receiving just 12 hours of training on the game, spread over a month, the 60- to 85-year-old study participants improved their performance until it surpassed that of 20-somethings who played the game for the first time.

The training also improved the participants’ performance in two other important cognitive areas: working memory and sustained attention. And participants maintained their skills at the video game six months after the training had ended.

“The finding is a powerful example of how plastic the older brain is,” said Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, UCSF associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center. Gazzaley co-founded the company, Akili Interactive Labs, which is developing the next generation of the video game.

Gazzaley, who has made a career out of studying how distraction affects cognitive performance, said his game, NeuroRacer, does more than any ordinary game – be it bridge, a crossword puzzle, or an off-the-shelf video game – to condition the brain. Like a good teacher, he said, NeuroRacer undermines people’s natural tendency to go on automatic pilot once they’ve mastered a skill, and pushes them further than they think they can go.

“Normally, when you get better at something, it gets easier,” he said. But with this game, “when you get better, it gets harder.”

Brain Training Reverses Age-Related Decline

Evidence that the adult brain is capable of learning has been accumulating for more than a dozen years. A study of London taxi drivers, for example, found that their brains had changed as they learned to navigate the city’s notoriously complicated streets. Nevertheless, Gazzaley said the brain’s function often erodes steadily over time in many areas, with some exceptions, like wisdom.

Given this, Gazzaley said it’s encouraging that even a small amount of brain training can reverse some of the age-related decline.

Gazzaley’s group found evidence of a possible brain mechanism that may explain the improvements he saw in his older subjects, and why these gains transferred to other cognitive areas. Electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings point to changes in a neural network involved in cognitive control, which is necessary to pursue goals.

The scientists measured midline frontal theta – or low frequency oscillations – in the prefrontal cortex, as well as the coherence in these waves between frontal and posterior regions of the brain. As the older “drivers” became more adept at the multitasking challenges of NeuroRacer, their brains modulated this key neural network and its activity began to resemble that of young adults.

Both of these measures – midline frontal theta and theta coherence – are well established neural markers of cognitive control that have been associated with many of the processes that enable people to pursue their goals.

We see this as evidence that the training may have improved our study participants’ ability to stay in an engaged, active state for a longer period of time,” said Joaquin A. Anguera, the paper’s first author and a post-doctoral fellow in Gazzaley’s lab.

Indeed, the researchers found that the training-induced changes in this neural network predicted how well participants would do on a different test, called the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), which measures sustained attention.

“The amount that midline frontal theta went up was related to something that was untrained, this other measure, the TOVA,” Anguera said.  “It implies there’s something that changed that was common to the training and to the task we tested afterwards.”

Gazzaley said these findings point toward a common neural basis of cognitive control that is enhanced by the challenging and high-interference conditions of the video game, and this might explain how racing a car in 3-D could improve something as seemingly unrelated as memory.

If the finding holds, it could have wide application. Other brain disorders like ADHD, depression and dementia are also associated with deficits in cognitive control.

“Follow up studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and transcranial electrical stimulation are still needed to better understand exactly how this network is involved in the performance changes,” Gazzaley said.

Poor concentration: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life

Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by — and perpetuate — their financial woes.

Published in the journal Science, the study presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty. The researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on the very avenues that would lead them out of poverty. A person’s cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs. Thusly, a person is left with fewer “mental resources” to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training and even managing their time.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.

But when their concerns were benign, low-income individuals performed competently, at a similar level to people who were well off, said corresponding author Jiaying Zhao, who conducted the study as a doctoral student in the lab of co-author Eldar Shafir, Princeton’s William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs. Zhao and Shafir worked with Anandi Mani, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick in Britain, and Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard University economics professor.

"These pressures create a salient concern in the mind and draw mental resources to the problem itself. That means we are unable to focus on other things in life that need our attention," said Zhao, who is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.

"Previous views of poverty have blamed poverty on personal failings, or an environment that is not conducive to success," she said. "We’re arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function. The very condition of not having enough can actually be a cause of poverty."

The mental tax that poverty can put on the brain is distinct from stress, Shafir explained. Stress is a person’s response to various outside pressures that — according to studies of arousal and performance — can actually enhance a person’s functioning, he said. In the Science study, Shafir and his colleagues instead describe an immediate rather than chronic preoccupation with limited resources that can be a detriment to unrelated yet still important tasks.

"Stress itself doesn’t predict that people can’t perform well — they may do better up to a point," Shafir said. "A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don’t have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It’s the other tasks where they perform poorly."

The fallout of neglecting other areas of life may loom larger for a person just scraping by, Shafir said. Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management — these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardship, Shafir said. He and Mullainathan were co-authors on a 2012 Science paper that reported a higher likelihood of poor people to engage in behaviors that reinforce the conditions of poverty, such as excessive borrowing.

"They can make the same mistakes, but the outcomes of errors are more dear," Shafir said. "So, if you live in poverty, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly — it’s hard to find a way out."

The first set of experiments took place in a New Jersey mall between 2010 and 2011 with roughly 400 subjects chosen at random. Their median annual income was around $70,000 and the lowest income was around $20,000. The researchers created scenarios wherein subjects had to ponder how they would solve financial problems, for example, whether they would handle a sudden car repair by paying in full, borrowing money or putting the repairs off. Participants were assigned either an “easy” or “hard” scenario in which the cost was low or high — such as $150 or $1,500 for the car repair. While participants pondered these scenarios, they performed common fluid-intelligence and cognition tests.

Subjects were divided into a “poor” group and a “rich” group based on their income. The study showed that when the scenarios were easy — the financial problems not too severe — the poor and rich performed equally well on the cognitive tests. But when they thought about the hard scenarios, people at the lower end of the income scale performed significantly worse on both cognitive tests, while the rich participants were unfazed.

To better gauge the influence of poverty in natural contexts, between 2010 and 2011 the researchers also tested 464 sugarcane farmers in India who rely on the annual harvest for at least 60 percent of their income. Because sugarcane harvests occur once a year, these are farmers who find themselves rich after harvest and poor before it. Each farmer was given the same tests before and after the harvest, and performed better on both tests post-harvest compared to pre-harvest.

The cognitive effect of poverty the researchers found relates to the more general influence of “scarcity” on cognition, which is the larger focus of Shafir’s research group. Scarcity in this case relates to any deficit — be it in money, time, social ties or even calories — that people experience in trying to meet their needs. Scarcity consumes “mental bandwidth” that would otherwise go to other concerns in life, Zhao said.

"These findings fit in with our story of how scarcity captures attention. It consumes your mental bandwidth," Zhao said. "Just asking a poor person to think about hypothetical financial problems reduces mental bandwidth. This is an acute, immediate impact, and has implications for scarcity of resources of any kind."

"We documented similar effects among people who are not otherwise poor, but on whom we imposed scarce resources," Shafir added. "It’s not about being a poor person — it’s about living in poverty."

Many types of scarcity are temporary and often discretionary, said Shafir, who is co-author with Mullainathan of the book, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” to be published in September. For instance, a person pressed for time can reschedule appointments, cancel something or even decide to take on less.

"When you’re poor you can’t say, ‘I’ve had enough, I’m not going to be poor anymore.’ Or, ‘Forget it, I just won’t give my kids dinner, or pay rent this month.’ Poverty imposes a much stronger load that’s not optional and in very many cases is long lasting," Shafir said. "It’s not a choice you’re making — you’re just reduced to few options. This is not something you see with many other types of scarcity."

The researchers suggest that services for the poor should accommodate the dominance that poverty has on a person’s time and thinking. Such steps would include simpler aid forms and more guidance in receiving assistance, or training and educational programs structured to be more forgiving of unexpected absences, so that a person who has stumbled can more easily try again.

"You want to design a context that is more scarcity proof," said Shafir, noting that better-off people have access to regular support in their daily lives, be it a computer reminder, a personal assistant, a housecleaner or a babysitter.

"There’s very little you can do with time to get more money, but a lot you can do with money to get more time," Shafir said. "The poor, who our research suggests are bound to make more mistakes and pay more dearly for errors, inhabit contexts often not designed to help."

Online games offer trove of brain data

Study of 35 million users of brain-training software finds alcohol and sleep linked to cognitive performance.

By trawling through data from 35 million users of online ‘brain-training’ tools, researchers have conducted a survey of what they say is the world’s largest data set of human cognitive performance. Their preliminary results show that drinking moderately correlates with better cognitive performance and that sleeping too little or too much has a negative association.

The study, published this week in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, analysed user data from Lumosity, a collection of web-based games made by Lumos Labs, based in San Francisco, California. Researchers at Lumos conducted the study in collaboration with scientists at two US universities as part of the Human Cognition Project, which the authors describe as “a collaborative research effort to describe the human mind”.

The authors examined results from more than 600 million completed tasks — which measured players’ speed, memory capacity and cognitive flexibility — to get a snapshot of how lifestyle factors can affect cognition and how learning ability changes with age.

Users who enjoyed one or two alcoholic drinks a day tended to perform better on cognitive tasks than teetotallers and heavier drinkers, whose scores dropped as the number of daily drinks increased. The optimal sleep time was seven hours, with performance worsening for every hour of sleep lost or added.

The study authors also looked at performance over time for users who returned to the same brain-training tasks at least 25 times. Performance decreased with age, but the ability to learn new tasks that relied on ‘crystallized knowledge’ (such as vocabulary) did not decline as quickly as it did for those that measured ‘fluid intelligence’ (such as the ability to memorize new sets of information).

Daniel Sternberg, a data scientist at Lumos who led the study, and his colleagues say that their study sample is much broader than those of most psychological studies, which tend to draw from pools of university students.

Buzzwords and biased samples?

But Frederick Unverzagt, neuropsychologist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, who has studied other cognitive-training tools such as training courses in verbal reasoning or speed processing in patients with dementia, says that the sample in this study is also biased: the users of brain-training tools are younger (compared to the typical dementia patients), most of them live in the United States or Europe and, most importantly, they are likely to already be interested in cognitive-training tasks. Although Lumosity has a pool of 35 million users, when the researchers looked at changes in performance over time, they focused on groups of about 22,000 people.

“From a trials perspective, this is very selective,” says Fred Wolinsky, a public-health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who has also studied the efficacy of brain-training techniques. “The lower performance scores they saw in older individuals,” he says, “could be attributable to the fact that the older adults were the ones who stuck with it for a long time because they were the ones who needed the training the most.”

And the findings are not controversial or particularly surprising. “But what is interesting and important is this idea that we can have a new paradigm for doing this kind of research: looking at large data sets in order to look at many different kinds of people, to tease out the demographic and lifestyle factors that influence cognition,” says Sternberg. “There are many other interesting questions that other researchers could answer by using this data set — this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

A 20-minute bout of yoga stimulates brain function immediately after

Researchers report that a single, 20-minute session of Hatha yoga significantly improved participants’ speed and accuracy on tests of working memory and inhibitory control, two measures of brain function associated with the ability to maintain focus and take in, retain and use new information. Participants performed significantly better immediately after the yoga practice than after moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise for the same amount of time.

The 30 study subjects were young, female, undergraduate students. The new findings appear in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health.

“Yoga is an ancient Indian science and way of life that includes not only physical movements and postures but also regulated breathing and meditation,” said Neha Gothe, who led the study while a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gothe now is a professor of kinesiology, health and sport studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “The practice involves an active attentional or mindfulness component but its potential benefits have not been thoroughly explored.”

“Yoga is becoming an increasingly popular form of exercise in the U.S. and it is imperative to systematically examine its health benefits, especially the mental health benefits that this unique mind-body form of activity may offer,” said Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Edward McAuley, who directs the Exercise Psychology Laboratory where the study was conducted.

The yoga intervention involved a 20-minute progression of seated, standing and supine yoga postures that included isometric contraction and relaxation of different muscle groups and regulated breathing. The session concluded with a meditative posture and deep breathing.

Participants also completed an aerobic exercise session where they walked or jogged on a treadmill for 20 minutes. Each subject worked out at a suitable speed and incline of the treadmill, with the goal of maintaining 60 to 70 percent of her maximum heart rate throughout the exercise session.

“This range was chosen to replicate previous findings that have shown improved cognitive performance in response to this intensity,” the researchers reported.

Gothe and her colleagues were surprised to see that participants showed more improvement in their reaction times and accuracy on cognitive tasks after yoga practice than after the aerobic exercise session, which showed no significant improvements on the working memory and inhibitory control scores.

“It appears that following yoga practice, the participants were better able to focus their mental resources, process information quickly, more accurately and also learn, hold and update pieces of information more effectively than after performing an aerobic exercise bout,” Gothe said. “The breathing and meditative exercises aim at calming the mind and body and keeping distracting thoughts away while you focus on your body, posture or breath. Maybe these processes translate beyond yoga practice when you try to perform mental tasks or day-to-day activities.”

Many factors could explain the results, Gothe said. “Enhanced self-awareness that comes with meditational exercises is just one of the possible mechanisms. Besides, meditation and breathing exercises are known to reduce anxiety and stress, which in turn can improve scores on some cognitive tests,” she said.

“We only examined the effects of a 20-minute bout of yoga and aerobic exercise in this study among female undergraduates,” McAuley said. “However, this study is extremely timely and the results will enable yoga researchers to power and design their interventions in the future. We see similar promising findings among older adults as well. Yoga research is in its nascent stages and with its increasing popularity across the globe, researchers need to adopt rigorous systematic approaches to examine not only its cognitive but also physical health benefits across the lifespan.”

Too early to learn

Reseachers from Bochum and Warwick suggest consequences for planning school lessons

Large numbers of preterm born babies will place new demands on education system

About 15 million, i.e., more than ten per cent of all babies worldwide are born preterm every year; that is before the 37th week of pregnancy – and the numbers are rising due to improvements in neonatal medicine and demographic changes. Recent studies suggest that delivery at any gestation other than full term (39 to 41 weeks gestational age) may impair brain development, rendering survivors at risk for adverse neuro-cognitive outcomes. Considering that 50 per cent of children are born before the 39th week of pregnancy, even small increases in cognitive impairments may have large effects on a population level. “As the total number of children born preterm increases there will be parallel increases in special education needs placing new demands on the education system,” Julia Jäkel and her colleagues say. To date, uncertainties remain regarding the nature and underlying causes of learning difficulties in preterm children. The new cognitive workload model now reconciles previous inconsistent findings on the relationship of gestational age and cognitive performance.

Cognitive deficits of children born preterm depend on the workload of the task

The research team tested 1326 children, born between weeks 23 and 41 of pregnancy, at an age of eight years. Data were collected as part of the prospective Bavarian Longitudinal Study. The children took part in a range of cognitive tests with varying workload. High workload tasks require the simultaneous integration of different sources of information, thereby placing high demands on the so called working memory. The results: The higher the workload and the shorter the pregnancy duration, the larger were the cognitive performance deficits. Deficits were disproportionally higher for children born before the 34th week of pregnancy compared with children born after week 33. Being born preterm specifically affected the ability to solve high workload tasks, whereas lower workload tasks were largely unaffected.

Results are relevant for cognitive follow-ups and planning of school lessons

According to the researchers, these results should be taken into account for routine cognitive follow-ups of preterm children as well as for planning school lessons. “New studies suggest that computerized training can improve working memory capacity,” Prof Dieter Wolke from Warwick says. “In addition, educational interventions could be developed in which information is not presented simultaneously to preterm children but more slowly and sequentially to promote academic attainment.”

Mediterranean diet may not protect brain

Hopes that a Mediterranean diet would be as good for the head as it is for the heart may have been dampened by a French study that found little benefit for aging brains from the diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, wine and olive oil.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at the participants’ dietary patterns in middle age and measured their cognitive performance at around age 65, but found no connection between Mediterranean eating and mental performance.

"Our study does not support the hypothesis of a significant neuroprotective effect of a (Mediterranean diet) on cognitive function," writes study leader Emmanuelle Kesse-Guyot at the nutritional epidemiology research centre of the French national health research agency INSERM.

It’s been suggested that the “good” fats in the Mediterranean diet might benefit the brain directly, or that low saturated fats and high fiber in the diet could help stave off cognitive decline indirectly by keeping blood vessels healthy.

Previous research has seemed to uphold that premise.

One large study in the US Midwest, for example, found that people in their 60s and older who ate a mostly Mediterranean diet were less prone to mental decline as they aged. Another study of residents of Manhattan linked a Mediterranean-style diet to a 40 per cent lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

No significant difference

Researchers in the French study used data on 3083 people who were followed from the mid-1990s, when they were at least 45 years old.

At the beginning of the study, participants recorded what they ate over one 24-hour period every two months, for a total of six dietary record samples per year. Then, between 2007 and 2009 when the participants were about 65 years old, their memory and other mental abilities were measured.

Researchers then separated participants into three categories depending on how closely they adhered to a Mediterranean-style diet, and compared their mental ability test scores.

Overall, they found that people who ate a diet closest to the Mediterranean ideal performed about the same as those who ate a non-restricted diet.

Associate Professor Nikos Scarmeas, of New York’s Columbia University Medical Center, was not involved with the study but has researched the effects of food on brain health. He says it’s important to note that the new study had some limitations.

For instance, researchers only tested the participants’ mental abilities once, making it impossible to track whether they got better or worse over time, adds Scarmeas.

"We don’t have the strong evidence to go and tell people, ‘Listen, if you follow this diet, it will improve cognition’," he says.

(Image: mediterraneandiet.com)

Less tau reduces seizures and sudden death in severe epilepsy

Deleting or reducing expression of a gene that carries the code for tau, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease, can prevent seizures in a severe type of epilepsy linked to sudden death, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., in a report in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

A growing understanding of the link between epilepsy and some forms of inherited Alzheimer’s disease led to the finding that could point the way toward new drugs for seizure disorders said Dr. Jeffrey Noebels, professor of neurology at BCM, and director of the Blue Bird Circle Developmental Neurogenetics Laboratory.

In her research, Jerrah Holth, a graduate student in molecular and human genetics at BCM who was working with mice with the severe form of epilepsy in Noebel’s laboratory, deleted the gene for tau. She found that reducing or eliminating tau also prevented the seizures in a severe form of epilepsy that has been associated with sudden death and reduced deaths in the animals.

In an earlier experiment, Noebels, in collaboration with Dr. Lennart Mucke at the Gladstone Research Laboratory at the University of California San Francisco, found that mice who carried a human gene that leads to accumulation of the beta amyloid protein and the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, also had epileptic seizures arising in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory storage and retrieval.

"This led to the paradigm-shifting hypothesis that excessive neuronal network activity, rather than too little, may contribute to lower cognitive performance and dementia in some forms of Alzheimer’s disease. When this happens, the progression of memory loss may accelerate," said Noebels.

The finding also demonstrated the two disorders may share defects in signaling within brain memory circuits.

The two labs went on to show that deleting the second gene for tau ameliorated both cognitive losses and seizures in the mice whose inherited disorder mimicked Alzheimer’s disease found in humans.

Holth’s finding demonstrates that tau is involved in a far broader range of epilepsy than previously suspected, said Noebels. The type of epilepsy she studied resulted from an inherited potassium ion channel defect that affects the flow of the potassium in and out of nerve cells. She found that removing the gene encoding Tau not only dramatically reduced seizures, but prevented the mice from dying early, which typically happens in these animals.

"Even a partial reduction of the amount of tau protein by 50 percent was highly effective," said Holth. Her finding suggests developing new drugs that lower the normal interactions of the tau protein may reduce seizures and sudden unexpected death for persons with intractable epilepsies, a problem in nearly one-third of the 5 million Americans with this disorder.

Currently, Noebels and his colleagues in the Blue Bird Laboratory are studying whether the loss of tau can correct a seizure disorder once it is already established. If these studies prove fruitful, “the pharmacological discovery programs under development for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease may one day find their way to the epilepsy clinic,” said Noebels.

(Image: ALAMY)

Vitamin D Tied to Women’s Cognitive Performance

Two new studies appearing in the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences show that vitamin D may be a vital component for the cognitive health of women as they age.

Higher vitamin D dietary intake is associated with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to research conducted by a team led by Cedric Annweiler, MD, PhD, at the Angers University Hospital in France.

Similarly, investigators led by Yelena Slinin, MD, MS, at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis found that low vitamin D levels among older women are associated with higher odds of global cognitive impairment and a higher risk of global cognitive decline.

Slinin’s group based its analysis on 6,257 community-dwelling older women who had vitamin D levels measured during the Study of Osteopathic Fractures and whose cognitive function was tested by the Mini-Mental State Examination and/or Trail Making Test Part B.

Very low levels of vitamin D (less than 10 nanograms per milliliter of blood serum) among older women were associated with higher odds of global cognitive impairment at baseline, and low vitamin D levels (less than 20 nanograms per milliliter) among cognitively-impaired women were associated with a higher risk of incident global cognitive decline, as measured by performance on the Mini-Mental State Examination.

Annweieler’s team’s findings were based on data from 498 community-dwelling women who participated in the Toulouse cohort of the Epidemiology of Osteoporosis study.

Among this population, women who developed Alzheimer’s disease had lower baseline vitamin D intakes (an average of 50.3 micrograms per week) than those who developed other dementias (an average of 63.6 micrograms per week) or no dementia at all (an average of 59.0 micrograms per week).

These reports follow an article published in the Journals of Gerontology Series A earlier this year that found that both men and women who don’t get enough vitamin D — either from diet, supplements, or sun exposure — may be at increased risk of developing mobility limitations and disability.

(Photo Credit: Paul Burns / Getty Images)