We are delighted to bring you our latest memory game called Restaurant. Waiters have notoriously great memory - they train day after day. They remember who ordered specific dishes sometimes even after the guests have shuffled seats. They do this despite the distractions of restaurant noise and kitchen conversations. Is your memory as good as a waiter’s?

July 4th is almost here and there are likely to be BBQs, family gatherings, community events, fireworks and more on the agenda over the next few days.  Is this good for your brain? “Absolutely”, says the scientific community who have studied the positive effects of socializing on the brain - specifically delaying brain decline and reducing stress.  To give you a little incentive to get out there and mingle, here are a few articles to consider:

• Socializing Appears to Delay Memory Problems
  
• Multiple Benefits of Socializing for Older Women
  
• How important is socialization?

Convinced?  So get together with family and friends and have a great 4th of July weekend. Your brain will thank you!

There are many memory disorders and it can be difficult to understand the differences. I am asked the question all the time “What are the different type of memory loss?” Let me offer a very brief summary here…..

• Normal memory loss: Everybody’s brain ages. As the connections and chemicals in the brain alter with time, many people forget things like names, keys or what the they went in the next room for. This is fairly normal, and does not automatically lead to deterioration if a person is leading a brain healthy lifestyle overall.
• Mild cognitive impairment (MCI): Problems with memory, language, or other problem solving functions may be noticeable to others but they may not yet interfere with daily life activities. For example, a person continually loses their keys and forget a neighbor’s names however, they can still pay bills and do their regular shopping. The presence of MCI often shows up on professionally administered screening tests. It is thought that 1 in 5 people over 70 have MCI.  Some develop Alzheimer’s disease later on and others do not.
• Early stage Alzheimer’s disease: In addition to pronounced memory problems (perhaps forgetting what happened yesterday or forgetting major news events), there can be cognitive troubles such as the inability count backward by 7s, becoming confused while planning meals or managing finances or occasionally even getting lost in the neighborhood. This condition can be diagnosed through testing and a complete medical exam to rule out other potential problems.
• Mid and Late Alzheimer’s disease: This always follows in progression after early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, there are no improvements known, only periods of stabilization with remediation and gradual decline.
• Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease: This is different from early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Early-onset Alzheimer’s starts before age 65, thus the name.
• Dementia: Dementia is not a disease itself, but a set of symptoms including memory loss, cognitive problems, and other effects of deteriorating brain function. Alzheimer’s disease is one form of dementia. Other forms include vascular dementia (caused by very small strokes) and Lewy Body Dementia (of which Parkinson’s Disease Dementia is a subset).
• Senile dementia: This is an old fashioned term that usually refers to what we now call Alzheimer’s disease.

It is also important to note that there can be other causes of memory loss, some of which may just be temporary: These include depression, stress, insomnia, alcoholism, brain tumors, medications, or many other conditions.

I blogged about this issue last year, but was remind of it again as I was in contact with my alma mater - Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. The study finding are a wake-up call for brain exercising in all forms, even if some seem ‘trivial’. It showed that the under-30 generation was less likely to memorize pieces of information than over-50s, who have tended to use PDA technologies less than the younger generation. Read the study findings 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…..

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.

We are happy to offer this new game for preview to our members. Click here, login and play!

Game Description
Learn to recognize bird species by their song. You’ll need to discriminate between images of different species of birds and also between different types of songs. At times, these differences may be subtle, which makes this task especially challenging.

Cognitive Function Trained
This is a cross-modal task mainly involving the right tempo-parietal regions of the brain. The purpose of this game is to draw upon our working memories of visual and auditory characteristics of each bird, to practice visual-spatial scanning of the images on the screen, and to practice concentration for this type of material. In some cases, deductive reasoning is needed in order to choose the right match, eliminating the choices that have already been made and those that are most obviously wrong.

Benefit to Daily Life
In an increasingly noisy world, the ability to detect meaningful sounds in the midst of general background noise becomes very important. Our ability to distinguish such sounds can become less precise as we age. This game helps train the characteristics necessary to stay sharp in this area.

Are you unable to remember more than two phone numbers? Then you may be a “victim” of new technologies. Chances are, it is easier for you to store information on your hard disk, electronic organizer or mobile phone, rather than use your memory.

This finding is the result of a study on 3000 subjects by Dr. Ian Robertson, a Professor of Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The study shows that the under-30 generation was less likely to memorize such pieces of information than over-50s who are less keen on new technologies and use their memory more. We have learned to “outsource” our memory by storing this kind of information on mobiles or computers rather than our own brain but “The less you use of your memory, the poorer it becomes.”, said Dr. Robertson.

So do your memory a favor and challenge yourself to remember important details rather than rely on electronic devices. Your brain will thank you in the long run!

Click here to read the full article: