HAPPYneuron is excited to bring our brain fitness games to Yahoo! visitors during a special back to school promotion. This weekend, visitors can click on the animated back to school logo on the Yahoo! homepage www.yahoo.com to play four of our scientifically-grounded games, which promote healthy brains for back-to-school.

“We are delighted to be selected by Yahoo! to show their users how brain training can be of great benefit to kids and parents alike,” said Laura Fay, CEO of HAPPYneuron. “By offering fun and challenging games from HAPPYneuron to Yahoo! visitors, we can show that the process of strengthening the brain can be quite fun!”

Be sure to visit www.yahoo.com and check out the four featured games. Even if you’re not headed back to school, it’s always a good time to keep the brain active with the fun and challenging games from HAPPYneuron!

Do women remember better then men do? Research shows that females may have an advantage over men when it comes to episodic memory, the type of long term memory based in personal experiences. A Swedish team of psychologists showed, for example, that women are better on average than men at remembering faces.

Previous studies have shown that women also have a superior memory for verbal information, which they may use to detect a person’s underlying motives or intentions - a skill that, “seems to elude many men”.

As you may have seen, this week we announced a relationship with the French National Research Center and the Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC) at La Pitié-Salpétrière Hospital in Paris. The research program aims to measure the positive effects of HAPPYneuron‘s products on the cognitive rehabilitation of patients suffering from depression and Alzheimer’s disease. We are talking not just about preventative training activities to defer the onset of age related brain decline, but the actual regaining of cognitive function through rehabilitation. This is a very exciting prospect for so many who suffer from the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

The team at the Pierre & Marie Curie University Hospital are indeed dedicated and committed to this project which we are very optimistic about the positive outcomes and we are excited to be working hand-in-hand with them.

A second objective of the collaboration is to develop distance therapy procedures that can be applied and used by practitioners in the rehabilitation of patients without the patient’s need too visit the doctor’s office in person. This will have huge implications for people located in rural areas and those that may be house bound or find it difficult to get to a doctor’s office for therapy. For the medical practitioner, the goal is to guide the patient’s therapy through phone interaction with the assistance of a cognitive informational dashboard to assess the patient’s compliance and progress.

Lastly, we expect to focus on further research on emotional rehabilitation.

We look forward to sharing the results of this research as it evolves.

I was reading a government report on aging related statistics, and was intrigued to note that about 15% of men aged 65+ report memory loss compared with only 11% of women of the same age group and the gap widens significantly after the age of 85. So I ponder….why is it that women have a higher propensity to take preventative measures to engage in brain training at higher rate then men, with a view to staying sharp and deferring decline? So here’s a brain teaser - which is the cause and which is the effect? Interested in your thoughts…

Dementia is a brain disorder that seriously affects a person’s ability to carry out daily activities. The most common form of dementia among older people is Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which initially involves the parts of the brain that control thought, memory, and language. Although scientists are learning more every day, right now they still do not know what causes AD, and there is no cure.

In this Time/CNN article, Walter Kukull, director of the U.S. National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center explains how researchers could reduce people’s risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. In this brief yet informative interview, he talks about genetics, drug discovery, and mitigating diseases. Read more about it here…

AMERICANS may worry about heart disease, stroke and diabetes, but they downright dread Alzheimer’s disease, a recent survey found. For good reason. One in eight adults over 65 is affected by the disease.

Those who are spared know they may end up with the burden of caring for a parent or a spouse who is affected. Even though the number of older adults with dementias is rising rapidly, only a few drugs that have been approved to treat symptoms are on the market, and they slow down the disease but do not cure it. Researchers, however, are more optimistic than ever about the potential of the aging brain, because recent evidence has challenged long-held beliefs by demonstrating that the brain can grow new nerve cells and that Brain Training can be a big help. Read the informative New York Times article here…..

Here’s an article in the New York Times that suggests ways to improve our thinking. Learning new material, yoga, aerobic exercise and caffeine are all mentioned as ways to stay sharp and in tune. In addition, there’s a link to another article that explains what mental status tests are, how they are performed and what the results mean. Click here for more….

The scientific community continues to push ahead to identify the strong correlation between engaged in structured memory training and the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently (also referred to as Fluid Intelligence). The results of this important study were published on April 28th in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and are very noteworthy. An article in the New York Times describes the study, the results and the scientific conclusions.

It seems that Alzheimer’s disease crops up in the news every week…..new drugs, new risk factors, compelling personal stories. Here’s a very informative article and two videos from the New York Times that humanize and sum up what the disease is about from different perspectives. Read more about it here…

A few days ago I got quite a chuckle at an article on aging and memory by David Brooks of the New York Times and thought to share it with you. David claims this will be the Century of the Bad Memory and in the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex. To read the article you need to register (free) for online access to the New York times, but you are sure to relate to the article and  have a few chuckles in the process. Worth it if you consider that laughter is also a positive contributor to brain health. Read on here….