Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle Is the Key to Self-Empowered Aging

Of course some research says that brain train­ing does not work to be followed by the ones that disagree. Which way does your doctor fall? Sounds like you are going to have to do this on your own. Be careful out there, this could be dangerous.
http://sharpbrains.com/solving-the-brain-fitness-puzzle-is-the-key-to-self-empowered-aging/
As the con­cept of brain fit­ness (or, the brain’s abil­ity to func­tion effi­ciently and effec­tively in per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life) goes main­stream, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of sci­en­tific find­ings, media reports, and com­mer­cial claims is gen­er­at­ing much noise and con­fu­sion. Know­ing what to believe and what to do presents a real-life puz­zle, lead­ing many peo­ple to either inac­tion or toward a focus on the wrong priorities.

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This past Octo­ber, sixty-nine sci­en­tists, con­vened by the Stan­ford Cen­ter on Longevity, released an announce­ment stat­ing that there is a sci­en­tific con­sen­sus that brain train­ing does not work (Allaire et al., 2014). By Decem­ber, 127 sci­en­tists world­wide had signed another state­ment, chal­leng­ing the pre­vi­ous “con­sen­sus” and sup­port­ing the value of brain train­ing (Alescio-Lautier et al., 2014).
The prob­lem here is not see­ing the for­est for the trees. Eighty-three per­cent of more than 3,000 early adopters sur­veyed by the inde­pen­dent mar­ket research firm Sharp­Brains (which I co-founded) agreed that “adults of all ages should take charge of their own brain fit­ness, with­out wait­ing for their doc­tors to tell them to” (Fer­nan­dez et al., 2013). When we con­ducted in-depth focus groups and inter­views with respon­dents, the main ques­tion many had was not what has per­fect sci­ence behind, but what has bet­ter sci­ence than the other things peo­ple are doing—solving cross­word puz­zle num­ber one mil­lion and one, tak­ing ‘brain sup­ple­ments,’ or doing noth­ing at all until depres­sion or demen­tia hits home.
And the unequiv­o­cal answer to that ques­tion, based upon the most author­i­ta­tive sys­tem­atic reviews of the evi­dence con­ducted to date (The Gov­ern­ment Office for Sci­ence, 2008; AHRQ, 2010), is a resound­ing yes—one thing does work bet­ter than most com­mon alter­na­tives. The chal­lenge is that “thing” is dif­fer­ent for everyone.

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