Mind360 Blog

Why fight back when you can play back? Indeed, with Alzheimer’s disease making the news headlines more frequently (a no-brainer considering this terrible disease is claiming so many victims), increasingly more organization are coming up with new ways to supposedly combat memory-loss problems.

Which methods actually help slow down or prevent the onset of memory loss is widely contested, unsurprisingly, though time will certainly tell which ones do indeed have any positive effects.

New Alzheimer’s Diagnosis Every 70 Seconds

According to The Alzheimer’s Association’s latest report, “5.3 million Americans are living with [Alzheimer’s] today, which translates into a new case of Alzheimer’s every 70 seconds. And as the oldest baby boomers are due to reach age 65 over the next two years, that rate will balloon by midcentury, so that someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease every 33 seconds.”

Read the entire article:

10 Things You Should Know About Alzheimer’s Disease

Strength in Numbers

While the general public is understandably skeptical about the various memory improvement games on the market - and other remedies claiming to stave off memory loss and other cognitive abilities - the number of new science-based enterprises entering the brain improvement game, like Mind360, is certainly a reason for hope.

Steve Daitch is the Social Media Manager at Mind360.com - a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills. As a Mind360 visitor you simply select your own Personal Training Program, which comes complete with a personal coach and constant feedback to ensure your swift and visible progress.

With so many brain training game providers out there claiming to help improve your cognitive abilities, it’s hard to know which ones actually work, and if so, to what degree. But if there’s one thing most experts agree on, it is that challenging your brain to virtually any ‘workout’ is always a worthwhile exercise, and certainly can’t hurt.

Simply put, it all comes down to “using it or losing it.” But for brain training to be truly effective, especially over the long term, each person requires a personal training program designed to meet his or her individual needs. In other words, one size does not fit all.

Brain Games vs. Brain Training Games

What’s more, once a personal training program has been selected, it is imperative that the games prescribed are not merely brain games, or teasers, as the overwhelming majority on today’s market are, but rather scientifically designed brain ‘training’ games that deliver actual results.

Moreover, just as a professional athlete focuses on training particular physical skills and muscles individually, (i.e. a tennis player’s serve, forehand and backhand strokes, running etc.), another key to successful brain training requires focusing on a single cognitive area at a time, and within certain time limits.

Staying in Touch Requires Staying in Touch

Whether it’s training your memory, attention, executive functions, or other key cognitive abilities, new evidence is surfacing virtually everyday with respect to what works… and what doesn’t. Stay tuned to Mind360.com as we provide further ‘How to’ information on ways to effectively train your brain and improve your overall mental fitness for healthier day-to-day living.

Steve Daitch is the Social Media Manager at Mind360.com - a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills. As a Mind360 visitor you simply select your own Personal Training Program, which comes complete with a personal coach and constant feedback to ensure your swift and visible progress.

With the emerging brain fitness industry already growing at what can best be described as a mind boggling pace, so too is the amount of information, and subsequent confusion, surrounding this vitally important field. This is especially true as increasingly more software and online developers get into the brain fitness game with the hopes of appealing to the huge baby boomer market unwilling to lose their marbles just yet.

Enter SharpBrains.com, a leading online site providing comprehensive news, information and resources about the mental fitness biz. Self-declared “the Brain Fitness Authority,” given the site’s impressive list of endorsements by a host of major media outlets, indeed, a few well-spent minutes checking out their site is convincing enough of SharpBrains market status. Considering all the positive press and endorsements this organization has enjoyed since its inception in 2005, this is a good place to start (and bookmark) as a reliable source of brain fitness information.

SharpBrains CEO Alvaro Fernandez

Boomers bent on maintaining their wits

According to SharpBrains co-founder and CEO, Alvaro Fernandez, “by 2015, the industry should reach $2 billion in annual sales,” adding that “ the growth will come from computer-savvy boomers and seniors eager to stay not just physically fit, but also mentally alert as they age.”

Mr. Fernandez, a Stanford University graduate (MBA, MA) served formerly as Director and GM of Edusoft’s Assess2know in addition to a number of other impressive corporate posts. He’s been quoted repeatedly by leading media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters, just to name a few. Alvaro Fernandez is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Agenda Councils” initiative, has published numerous acclaimed articles, as well as enjoys teaching The Science of Brain Health and Brain Fitness at both SFSU and UC-Berkeley.

Out of the fog blog

As would any on-the-ball website, SharpBrains too provides its viewers with a blog covering the wide spectrum of mental fitness issues including what’s in store for the brain fitness biz in the not-too-distant-future. “We can observe a number of trends that executives, consumers, public policy makers, and the media should watch closely in the coming years, as brain fitness and training becomes mainstream, new tools appear, and an ecosystem grows around it.”

Steve Daitch is the Social Media Manager at Mind360.com – a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills. As a Mind360 visitor you simply select your own Personal Training Program, which comes complete with a personal coach and constant feedback to ensure your swift and visible progress.

Bush shoe throwing inspires new games

The recent shoe throwing incident with President Bush has become instant fodder for a flood of new on-line games.

Mind360’s reaction speed game

Mind360’s offering, a reaction time speed test, has scored quite a hit on-line within the gaming community and current events watchers in general, receiving positive feedback in on-line press coverage from leading publications and tech blogs.

Defending Bush

While the majority of games enable the user to throw the shoe at President Bush, or pick which shoe, or how many shoes, or where exactly to aim the shoe, Mind360 has chosen a game designed to “protect” Bush.

Increasing reaction time

In the Bush Shoe Incident Game, the user gets to be Bush, “defending” him by clicking on his image at the podium each time the shoe is thrown at him. The object is to make Bush duck before the shoe hits, with the shoes coming at him at increasingly rapid speeds. The game is designed to test and develop the user’s reaction times in a lively and topical environment, giving the user a reaction time score at the game’s conclusion.

Key game

Blog network Wired.com, in its review of the glut of new Bush shoe throwing games that have cropped up on-line, called Mind360’s Bush Shoe Incident Game one of the “key” Bush shoe throwing games (Attack of the Bush Shoe-Toss Games Continues: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/12/attack-of-the-b.html).

Prominent screenshots

Screenshots of the game have been added to popular gaming sites such as the innovative MMOsite.com (Bush Incident-Throwing Games Continues: http://news.mmosite.com/content/2008-12-20/20081220113956750,1.shtml), while Zimbio, in it report on current internet memes, led off its coverage of the many on-line shoe games with a screen shot of Mind 360’s Bush Shoe Incident(http://news.mmosite.com/content/2008-12-20/20081220113956750,1.shtml).

Engaging users through current events

The Jerusalem Post was also effusive in its review of Mind 360’s BSIG in their report on Bush shoe games released, lauding Mind360 for using current events for brain training (Internet Flooded with Shoe-Throwing Games in Wake of Bush Incident, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellitecid=1229868841420&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull). The game measures response time, a capability that science has revealed is reduced with age.

High rank for Mind360

Dvice, the prominent tech review site, ranked Mind360 a very strong fourth in its top ten rankings of the wide range of Bush shoe throwing games that the incident inspired (Top Ten Bush Shoe Throwing Games on the Web: http://dvice.com/archives/2008/12/top_10_bush_sho.php).

Embedded at other gaming sites

Many sites also embedded the game in their sites for users to start playing instantly, among them Fishflash (http://www.fishflashgames.com/play-games/7/Bush-Shoe.php) and y8 (http://www.y8.com/games/Bush_Shoe_Game).

Overwhelming User Response

The game received particularly favorable responses from users at y8.com, where at last count the game has been played 16,520 times since it was submitted only four days ago on December 21, 2008. Of y.com users polled, Mind360 received an overhwelmingly positive landslide of 85.74% of the votes, 1281 for to 213 against.

Many YouTube visits

The game has also been a hit on YouTube, with 5,247 views and enthusiastic initial user comments (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0FJwwPDrwU).

Raising mental fitness

All in all, the strong response was an extremely encouraging sign for Mind360 as it continues to find new ways to bring topically relevant and engaging games to its users to train their brains and raise mental fitness.

Here you go, enjoy the Bush Shoe Game!

Are you faster then Bush?

See how exactly fast are you with our Bush Shoe Incident brain teaser.

The Doctor and Frau
Everyone has heard of Alzheimer’s but how many of you know where it is from? Well, as you have undoubtedly guessed, it started with a guy named Alzheimer. A doctor actually, a German physician named Alois Alzheimer, who first described the condition all the way back in 1906.

The Case
At a scientific meeting in November of that year, Dr. Alzheimer presented the case of “Frau Auguste D.,” a 51-year-old woman brought in by her family to see the doctor.

The Symptoms
Upon examining Frau D, Dr. Alzheimer found that Auguste exhibited symptoms in a unique set of problem areas: she had problems with memory, she displayed acute paranoia in her suspicions that her husband was unfaithful, and she experienced difficulty in both speaking and understanding what was said to her.

The Outcome
Her symptoms worsened steadily, and within a few years she was bedridden. In the Spring of 1906, Frau died. The official cause of death was “overwhelming infection from bedsores and pneumonia.”

The Study
Struck by this unseen combination of symptoms, Dr. Alzheimer obtained the family’s permission to perform an autopsy.

The Findings
What he saw in Frau’s brain amazed him: there was visible, dramatic physical shrinkage, particularly of the cortex, which we now know is the outer layer of our brain that supports memory, thinking, judgment and speech.

Under the Microscope
Upon further examination of Frau’s brain under a microscope, Alzheimer discovered a proliferation of fatty deposits in the small blood vessels of the brain, in between dead and dying brain cells, and surrounded by unrecognizable and clearly abnormal deposits running throughout the interior and exterior of the brain cells.

The Publishing and the Naming
Dr. Alzheimer published his findings the following year in 1907. Three years later, in 1910, psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, a noted researcher whose work was rooted in naming and classification of brain disorders, proposed that the disease be named after his esteemed colleague Dr. Alzheimer. And so did society’s most well-known aging disease first enter the literature of medical history

Tired of trying to remember where you left your keys? Tired of running behind schedule because you couldn’t find your wallet? Well, the time has come to react fast again, to shake your brain up and use it the way you’re used to. The time has come to play games that will exercise your brain the fun way.

Mind 360: The key to the power of cognition