“I took a Mensa home test prior to the training and didn’t pass…. Then I did the full training course, took the actual Mensa test, and got in! I’m very satisfied with the training.”

Do you have a brain training success story to share? Please let me know at martin@mindsparke.com

Neurofeedback TMS

Natural neurofeedback has been practiced for many years. By providing the subject with immediate feedback on the electrical activity in the brain, he or she can learn to modulate this activity. Up until now the direct impact of this process on brain mechanics has been little understood.

In a groundbreaking study, scientists from the University of London have gleaned the first evidence of neuroplastic changes associated with neurofeedback training. Thirty minutes of mindful control of brain waves can induce a persistent change in brain activity and response.

Tomas Ros and co-authors Diane Ruge and Moniek Munneke, under the supervision of Professors John Gruzelier and John Rothwell, showed that activating neurofeedback (suppressing alpha brainwaves) increased cortical responsiveness and significantly improved synaptic communication. These effects were observed for more than 20 minutes, a time-span consistent with neuroplastic change.

These findings call for a reexamination of prior studies of neurofeedback training, and hold out promise for natural brain training therapies.

Having now completed 32 days of doubled training, I am curious to see what happens in the next couple of weeks. For most people, dual n-back training progress follows a fairly straight line for the first 40 to 50 sessions, then slowing down. I would predict that the same might be true of the double-session training.

If so, it is fascinating to wonder what might be going on neurologically to explain the limit to the straight line increases…

Brain Training - Dual N-Back And "Nines"

Presented at the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry 2010 Annual Meeting the study focused on elderly adults, splitting the subjects into two groups, one with a delayed start to the training. The subjects in the group with six full months of training showed strong improvement on memory tests. The group with a delayed start had about half the training and showed a slight decrease in memory scores.

This tallies with the results of Mind Sparke customers who train long term. The benefits keep accruing and the cognitive skill improvements on the n-back task increase at a brisk pace on a straight line for two or three full training periods.

But today, being more settled, my focus came back and the benefits of the combined dual n-back and “nines” training resumed with a new high score of 10.45 at “nines.” My previous best was 9.7, set a couple of weeks ago.

"Nines" Session 60 - Avg. n=10.45

And here is the chart showing progress since I started the combined daily training:

Combined Brain Training Dual n-back / Nines

Parallel studies show that intensive working memory training  stimulates neurogenesis. Further, my own experience and the anecdotal experiences of Mind Sparke customers indicates that the training helps improve impulse control, self esteem, and elevate mood.

Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the UT team’s work is the first research to directly link addiction with neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

“More research will be needed to test this hypothesis, but treatments that increase adult neurogenesis may prevent addiction before it starts, which would be especially important for patients treated with potentially addictive medications,” said Dr. Amelia Eisch, senior study author and associate professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern. “Additionally, treatments that increase adult neurogenesis during abstinence might prevent relapse.”

Dr. Eisch and her team radiated rats’ brains to stop neurogenesis in the hippocampus. In one experiment, rats accessed cocaine by pressing a lever. The rats with radiated brains took more cocaine than rats that did not receive radiation.

In a second experiment, after becoming accustomed to taking cocaine the team radiated the rats, stopping neurogenesis while drugs were removed. Rats with reduced neurogenesis took more time to realize that the lever would no longer dispense cocaine.

“The nonirradiated rats didn’t like the cocaine as much and learned faster to not press the formerly drug-associated lever,” Dr. Eisch said. “In the context of this experiment, decreased neurogenesis fueled the process of addiction, instead of the cocaine changing the brain.”

Dr. Eisch plans to study other drugs of abuse, using imaging technology to study addiction and hippocampal neurogenesis in humans.

“If we can create and implement therapies that prevent addiction from happening in the first place, we can improve the length and quality of life for millions of drug abusers, and all those affected by an abuser’s behavior,” she said.

“Learning nouns activates the left fusiform gyrus, while learning verbs switches on other regions (the left inferior frontal gyrus and part of the left posterior medial temporal gyrus)”, says Catalan researcher Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, co-author of the study from the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit of the University of Barcelona.

He and neurologist Thomas F. Münte from the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, in Germany, reported their findings of neural differences in acquiring new nouns and verbs in the journal Neuroimage.

By studying real time scans showing brain activation during a language learning exercise the researchers confirmed prior observations that our brains handle nouns and verbs in different ways.

The scientists inserted nonsense words into otherwise meaningful sentences, and then asked the study participants to derive the meaning of the inserted word – “Joe bought his mom a grimo of flowers for Mother’s day…” for instance, indicates that the word “grimo” means “bunch.”

“This task simulates, at an experimental level, how we acquire part of our vocabulary over the course of our lives, by discovering the meaning of new words in written contexts”, explains Rodríguez-Fornells. “This kind of vocabulary acquisition based on verbal contexts is one of the most important mechanisms for learning new words during childhood and later as adults, because we are constantly learning new terms”.

They measured responses to 80 new nouns and 80 new verbs.

“[The] results suggest that the same regions previously associated with the representation of the meaning of nouns and verbs are also associated with establishing correspondences between these meanings and new words, a process that is necessary for learning a second language”, says Rodríguez-Fornells.