Brain Games and Exercising the Mind

With advances in understanding the brain and how it works moving along at a fairly rapid pace, the the for-profit industry is tailgating right behind. This is quite evident in the explosion of 'brain games' that have hit the market in the past couple of years.

A brain game is basically a game or puzzle involving problem solving or critical thinking in some form to 'exercise' the mind and supposedly make it stronger and more responsive.

Medical News Today has an article about the newest brain game to emerge. It's called Fit Brains and it's produced by Vivity Labs.

"Fit Brains is designed to be fun, personal and practical," said Dr. Paul Nussbaum, co-founder and chief scientific adviser. "Our goal is to motivate users to integrate brain fitness into their everyday routine."

Now, I'm all for exercising the mind and expanding it's possibilities, but I have a couple questions about brain games in general:

1. When did our everyday lives become so mundane and unenthralling that we have to incorporate an additional routine to strengthen the most important organ in our body? Shouldn't our time spent awake and thinking be full of activities that somehow make our minds better than they were when we woke up?
   
2. And why shove out loads of cash on new products when there are plenty of cheaper alternatives. Let's see, $29.99 for a computer game full of puzzles or $.50 for a newspaper full of puzzles, crosswords, and lots of other neat information. There are also hundreds of puzzle books for under $3 on the magazine rack at the grocery store.
3. And do these games even do anything helpful for us? It could be that the increase in mental output is somehow harmful to the overall cognitive state. Only time/research will tell.
   

Here's an interesting thought that may answer #1. What if there is an analogy of exercising the mind that is similar to exercising the body. In the last century, exercising the body became increasingly popular and necessary to keep the body in good shape. Why? Among other things, the advent of the automobile, increased food supply, less time spent outdoors. Society changed for the worse for body fitness, so if you wanted to be fit, you had to start exercising. Maybe the same is true for our brains. With the advent of the television (and the internet), less books are being read, and with an increasing amount of new information being presented to us each day, our minds are having to pick and choose which to acknowledge, ultimately dumbing us down.

So I ask you this, do you think, in order to keep a healthy and productive mind, one should have to start using a brain exercise routine? What are some ways you exercise your mind?

Also, check out this New York Times article on the subject.

The Effects of Caffeine: New Insights

Mind Hacks posted an article from the New York magazine about researchers who took a different approach in the ongoing see-saw that is the benefits and detriments of caffeine research. Their hypothesis was this: Caffeine does not give users a quick jolt of energy but is rather an illusion created by soothing the effects of the symptoms of withdrawal and returning the user to baseline.

My Thoughts: Now, I am a coffee drinker addict (I kind of have to be, I work at a coffee shop!) And I've noticed certain things about coffee and caffeine consumption. It may just be my body chemistry, but I rarely suffer from withdrawal symptoms such as headache, nausea, etc. I do however suffer from sleeplessness if I drink coffee too late at night, which I consider not to be a side-effect but rather an actual effect of the drug!

Here's an observation that does coincide with this article. Coffee does not give me a jolt anymore (unless I consume a large amount), it makes me normal. I've been saying this to people for awhile. If I don't drink some in the morning, I can't stay focused or alert. Of course, there are days where I don't have any caffeine at all and they aren't necessarily hell for me, I just 'don't seem like myself.'

Ok, back to the current study. Here's what these researchers found wrong with some of the research in caffeine conducted over the past half-century. It involved giving participants doses and controls placebos and then sending them on their way. The next day, both groups received another dose and the treatment group reported things like higher cognitive function, reduction of headache, etc. However this could just be caused by returning to the baseline. This makes sense that the drug relieves withdrawal symptoms, but what about the increase in cognitive function? And what about first time caffeine users?

As a current caffeine user, I like to keep up with the current research, so here are a few other articles on the topic for you to check out:

• A Men's Health article on the health benefits of coffee and a Harvard study supporting them.
• A Science Daily article about the potential for coffee to reduce the effects of Alzheimer's disease.
• The Caffeine FAQ from the University of Waterloo.
  
• A wonderful post over at Developing Intelligence with pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about coffee.
• A Caffeine Calculator from Energy Fiend.
  
• An old post at Alpha Psy showing the classic images of spiders on caffeine.
• A Blog Around the Clock reports on the effects of caffeine and circadian rhythms.
• An article from Divine Caroline debunking the myth that caffeine causes dehydration.
  

You be the judge on whether caffeine is good or bad for you. However, the jury's still out on this one in the scientific community.

Neuroimaging and Scanning the Brain

This morning on NPR, Diane Rehm had George Lakoff on talking about his new book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. I plan on picking it up sometime this week.

He had an interesting update from the field of neuroimaging. If you haven't heard, this technology of take pictures and mapping the brain is exploding right now. He talked about fMRI, how that even though we can scan the brain seconds at a time, a neuron will have fired a hundred times in that second. He also gave a really cool analogy showing how far we've come and how far we still have to go. I paraphrase:

Scanning the brain is like taking a photo of the Pentagon at night from space. You can see some lights are on, and if there are a lot of lights on, there may be a crisis going on. But the lights don't tell you what is being said or done inside.

This makes a lot of sense to me. You can take a picture of the brain any given second. You see certain areas light up with activity. But you don't really know what that really means until you either get in there closer or, you can attribute other things to the activity.

A recent article in Science descibed an experiment where researchers tried to find out how the brain represents conceptual information. Using an fMRI and the latest neural activity computer models, they predicted what would occur when someone was supplied with a certain word (such as airplane or celery.)

I love reading about the new breakthroughs in neuroimaging and brain scanning like this. This type of technology is going to revolutionize caring for the brain and ultimately finding out what really makes us tick.

Too Many Choices = Negative Effects

The psychology of choice and decision making is an increasingly popular aspect of cognition and personality, as it should be. The decisions we make result in much of our behaviors, so ultimately this process should be studied quite thoroughly, at all possible angles. Here's an interesting study that considers the negative effects of too many choices.

We are constantly bombarded with choices. Whether it's surveying a large wardrobe for the outfit of the day, what kind of coffee to order (do you really need that Quad Venti Non-fat Three Splenda with Whip Latte?), or which of the 300 television channels to watch, so many choices are at your discretion. But, it's not like this is new to us, it's how we were raised. Communicating with a child is usually in the form of a forced-choice question rather than an open-ended question (you don't say to a toddler, 'what do you want to eat?', it's more like 'do you what some fruit or a sandwich?').

Researchers from four universities tested the hypothesis that too many choices impairs one's self-control in a several part study. In the first experiment, they assigned 60 students to a choice or no-choice group. Next, they gave the choice group a long list of choices of products, whereas the no-choice group just rated a list of products. The researchers then presented every participant with a table full of 1 oz. cups of a distasteful liquid (orange soda, vinegar, and water) and told them for every cup they drank, they'd receive a nickle. What they found is that the choice group (M=2.06, SD=2.46) drank a significantly less amount of the drink than the no-choice group (M=7.67, SD=5.35), F(1, 29)=13.57, p=.001. They compared this task to taking one's medicine.

The second experiment involved 25 students, again assigned to a choice and no-choice group, then asked each participant to submerge one of their hands in a tank full of ice water. What they found was that the choice group (M=27.70sec, SD=15.81) had significantly lower times than the no-choice group (M=67.42sec, SD=56.35), F(1, 23)=5.97, p=.025.

So what does this mean? Although these experiments were unorthodox (and a little sadistic), they highlight some pretty interesting points. Does the act of being bombarded with too many choices just use up resources or fatigue our brains enough that we slack in other areas? If we can't stay motivated to take our medicine (the mean for the no choice group was almost 4-times the mean of the choice group) or be able to physically withstand some pain (the mean time for the choice group was half the mean time for the no-choice group) after making choices, then are the choices more harmful than they are helpful, and are they really necessary in the first place? Let's hear your thoughts.

References:

Vohs, K.D., Schmeichel, B.J., Nelson, N.M., Baumeister, R.F., Twenge, J.M., Tice, D.M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource
account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(5), 883-898.