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.

Baby boomers are people too. And like millions of people today, those of us born between 1946 and 1964 also spend too many hours surfing the net searching for things we never manage to find. Let’s face it; generally speaking, we’re not nearly as adept at navigating the Web as those younger than us. Indeed many of us just aren’t getting the attention we’d like or need? Life, it’s fair to say, is still so unfair.

Everything you always wanted to know about memory loss but forgot to ask

There are an estimated 78 million baby boomers in the US and the number of those using the internet is, well, booming! Hence, it’s no wonder increasingly more websites, blogs and portals etc. are popping up regularly online, offering everything from mental fitness to dating. The problem now is being able to quickly decipher which sites truly serve this demographic best.

Sure, you can always Google your way to the best sites, but who’s got time? And besides, why waste more unnecessary time when your Mind360 research team has already done the heavy sifting for you?

And so, without any further ado, allow us to present what we believe to currently be the best websites catering exclusively to the baby boomer population. Stay tuned as we’ll be updating this list on a regular basis.

Top Websites for Boomers

www.eons.com 
www.rl.tv
www.aarp.org 
www.myboomerplace.com 
www.growingbolder.com 
www.boomer411.com 
www.boomj.com
www.tbd.com
www.c-boom.com
www.babyboomercaretaker.com 
 
 
 

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.

The mellow elderly

Many elderly people seem sweet and happy, don’t they? Well, it is not your imagination. Science confirms that they are for a very specific reason.

Negative memory reduction

A research project between members of Alberta and Duke Universities reveals that brain activity in older people specifically causes them to remember fewer negative events than younger people. Further, the events they do remember do not seem so bad, or strike as much of a negative emotional reaction as in younger people.

Changes in brain activity

This is because seniors actually use their brains differently than younger people in storing memory, according to the scientist heading the study. Age related changes were discovered in elderly brain activity when participants of an average age of 70 years old were shown images of either neutral or strongly negative events.

Changes in interaction within the brain

The study, just published this month in the December edition of Psychological Science, clarified that there was no structural change in the emotional center of the brain among the different age groups. The emotional reaction in the elderly is altered as a result of changes in how those emotional centers interact with other parts of the brain such as memory.

Less stress

Another related effect is that when elderly people do remember negative events they are clinically proven to tend to view them as less stressful than younger people do. As far as negative images and memories are concerned, research observed a generally lower response in older people.

The older the memory, the better

In other words, it’s true: we don’t just mellow with age, we get happier.

Many of you have probably heard that the French propensity for drinking wine has been scientifically proven to reduce heart disease. Well first of all, it’s true. Second of all, that cup of red wine can also help keep Alzheimer’s away, as well as tumors.

A team of researchers at UCLA recently set to work to find out how this could be possible. This is what they discovered: naturally occurring compounds in red wine called polyphenols were clearly observed under microscope blocking the proteins that give rise to toxic plaques that destroy braincells.

For those with existing plaques (sorry, could be anyone, comes with age), polyphenols reduce the toxicity of those plaques, thus reducing the amount of cognitive deterioration that the plaques can otherwise cause.

For those of you who actually don’t like a nice glass of red wine, there are still more options: large quantities of many polyphenols show up in high concentration in tea, nuts, berries and some plants.

Anybody who wants to know more, don’t worry! That same team of doctors is beginning human trials to observe the effects of various forms and quantities of the over 8000 types of polyphenols. The goal is to determine what substances are best for people to consume to battle, prevent, or offset Alzheimer’s. And as soon as they know, you’ll know, because we are going to post immediately. So check back and stay tuned!