Actually the term brain fitness is a euphemism for a really new and exciting frontier in the human experience called brain plasticity. Michael Merzenich is a leading researcher in this field who has developed a specialty of improving people's ability to think and perceive by redesigning the brain
by training specific processing areas, called brain maps, so that they do more mental work. He has also shown how our brain processing areas change.

According to Norman Doidge M.D. in his book, "The Brain that Changes Itself-Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science", Merzenich has made the most ambitious claims for the concept of brain plasticity (or neuroplasticity); that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia, that plasticity exists from the cradle to the grave, and that radical improvements in cognitive functioning-how we learn, think, perceive, and remember-are possible even in the elderly. Merzinich argues that practicing a new skill, under the right conditions, can change hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the connections between the nerve cells in our brain maps.

One of the problems most troublesome for me these days is not being able to find words to describe a concept I want to communicate. Merzinich, according to Doidge, says that is because the brains attentional system and nucleus basilis have to be engaged for plasticity to occur.

If I am repeating the same skills that once took intense concentration to learn over and over, like in a career, my attentional system atrophies, and does not discrimate like it used to. (Have you ever watched a child focus intensely while learning a new skill? A huge number of brain cells are involved in that activity, but as the child learns the skill, the number of brain cells involved shrinks incredibly).

I need to learn a new skill in my old age that will demand intense concentration, which will fire up the attentional system and resurrect plasticity.

What new skills you ask? Well, they say learning a new language is good. Learning new physical activities which require intense concentration or a career change requiring learning new skills is good.

Activities like this slowly sharpen up everything in the brain, according to Merzinich.

What does not sharpen up the brain is the same ol' same ol' routine. Once I am involved in a career, and have safely mastered a certain number of behaviors, Merzenich and Doidge say we might just fool ourselves into thinking that learning is going on. It is not, the attentional system is not on, and plasticity withers away, and ....where did I put those glasses?

But since I may not be able to just change careers, and I have no desire to learn any new dance steps, I may want to use a computer program which a number of companies are developing to turn plasticity back on.

According to Merzenich, the trick is to give the adult brain the right stimuli, in the right order, with the right timing to drive plastic change.

The goal here is rebuild the brain's basic ability to process sound, by letting people listen to slowed, refined sounds. The program exercises every basic brain function involved in language from decoding sounds up to comprehension, which Doidge calls a kind of cerebral cross training.

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I have been following this particular field since the mid 1990's when I read Michael Hutchinson's book "Megabrain".

I must admit that I came to Hutchinson's work with a bit of inferiority needing to become superior, and was looking for a quick fix to my money issues, as I was switching careers, and had lived "economically" while in graduate school.

So I talked a partner into financing one of the tools mentioned in that book, EEG Biofeedback, and we got the technology and and began working with addictions and ADD clients, and it worked. They improved, and a number of the addictions clients got sober.

During that period of time, I also tried out the Open Focus materials created by Les Fehmi, which are excellent, and light and sound machines, which are great for driving hemispheric brain wave synchronization, and the Monroe Institute Hemi-Sync tapes, and the Awakened Mind by Anna Wise, and most importantly, HeartMath, or heart rate variability biofeedback, which is a very good tool for soothing the internal landscape. Using that tool teaches one, in perhaps 5-10 lessons, how to manage the time between heartbeats, which is a very soothing feeling.

The research on which HeartMath is based was not even available in the early '90s, so technology continues to take us rapidly toward managing and training very basic biological functions.

According to Merzenich, the trick is to give the adult brain the right stimuli, in the right order, with the right timing to drive plastic change.

So while doing crosswords or sudoku may exercise what you already have, it is only starting anew at something that demands 100% attention that plasticity, or the forming of new neuronal connections, will happen.



Alvaro Fernandez at Sharpbrains.com suggests that the best way to sort through the claims made by marketers is to remember that their are four pillars to brain fitness, which involve stress reduction, physical exercise, which may be the most important of all, good nutrition, and the kind of brain exercises (not games) which exercise discrete working memory or fluid intelligence skills for example. Brain games, like the Nintendo game, cannot truely be called a brain fitness tool because it does not meet the criteria listed above.

It appears in the short term that the brain fitness programs on the market now are of two types, the subscribe and practice online type, and the order the CD or DVD and install on your home computer. The difference is price. The programs for online use are of course significantly more economical to start. So if you are not sure about whether or not you are going to sustain a committment to this kind of study, that would be the way to go, so you could cancel and save some money, or continue, as you choose. The other option is to buy the program at a larger up front cost, but you then have it all.

Remember, the brain fitness materials are different from the brain games, which do not have the sequence Merzenich says is necessary to turn on plasticity again.

It is the novelty, which requires intense concentration, which he says is the key. So doing cross words or suduko, which exercise the same neural circuits are fine, but they will not turn on plasticity.

I am also reminded of the creativity exercises requiring the use of a non-dominant hand. It would seem that those would be very helpful, wouldn't it?

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