This is the third part of an article I am writing
about. “Last year, Gazzaley cofounded a
company called Akili Interactive Labs, which is developing an upgrade of
NeuroRacer called Evo. Like Posit
Science, Akili is seeking FDA approval for EVO as a possible software-based
treatment for ADHD. ‘Most people associate medicine with drugs, and that’s the
result of a big, successful brainwashing campaign by pharma companies,’
Gazzaley says. ‘But when it comes to brain health, drugs don’t work very well-
- and the drug companies know that. If you look across the world’s top – ten
pharma companies, four have withdrawn research from neuroscience. That’s not because we’ve cured any of these
diseases. Hopefully now we’ll start thinking of software and hardware as a form
of medicine.’ Gazzaley has been
preparing to open a new neuroscience laboratory at the University of
California, San Francisco. ‘We’re going to be able to record real-time EEG data
as you play one of our games,’ Gazzaley says.
‘The challenge won’t just be correlated to your performance, but also
directly by neural process in your brain.’ He gives Wired a copy of the
November 2013 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The cover headline
is ‘Game Changer’ and the image shows the cartoon of an old balding man driving
a car through NeuroRacer’s mountainous roads. ‘Before I’d developed NeuroRacer,
I used to give talks to groups of colleagues and present my data on cognitive
decline and its mechanisms, and they would love it, find it fascination. But when I gave talks about it to a public
audience of older people, like the American Association of Retired Persons, it
was horrifying. If you give a lot of
talks you get good at reading subtle signs in the audience. Every year at the AGM, I had over a thousand
people in the audience, all grey, and at the end of my talk, I could just see
them asking ‘Is this it? Is this the end
of the movie?’ There was this feeling like that was not really the right
ending.’ He points to the Nature
cover. ‘That is the right ending.’” It all sounds promising. It is the right
ending if it can rewire the brain so that schizophrenics feel that they are
doing better my having participated in sound research.
I will end this article with: “Older adults are often advised to keep their minds sharp, but such advice is so generally as to be useless. ‘It’s true that we lose abilities as we get older, but I believe that most of that loss is driven by a lack of effort to sustain brain fitness,’ says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and one of the most-cited scientists in the field of brain plasticity. ‘We’re lazy, we don’t get out of our comfort zones, we stop learning new things. The fact is that whatever you do, from activities to relationships to thoughts, ultimately enters the brain and affects it. But we can harness that property of the brain for our own benefit. Ultimately, it’s a message of hope for people.’ The science of neuroplasticity illuminates the dynamic evolution of our brains throughout life, documenting how different experiences can dramatically change it. Its most pertinent insight, however, is that we can take control of such transformation. Merzenich’s and Gazzaley’s brain training exercises provide us with a tool to do it. They are a gym for the brain, a place where we can go to strengthen and expand our cognitive capabilities, which, to a very large extent, define who we are and determine what we are capable of.” How far can we go? Makes me which I was younger and get into a field where the possibilities are endless with the brain. It is the new frontier.
I will end this article with: “Older adults are often advised to keep their minds sharp, but such advice is so generally as to be useless. ‘It’s true that we lose abilities as we get older, but I believe that most of that loss is driven by a lack of effort to sustain brain fitness,’ says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and one of the most-cited scientists in the field of brain plasticity. ‘We’re lazy, we don’t get out of our comfort zones, we stop learning new things. The fact is that whatever you do, from activities to relationships to thoughts, ultimately enters the brain and affects it. But we can harness that property of the brain for our own benefit. Ultimately, it’s a message of hope for people.’ The science of neuroplasticity illuminates the dynamic evolution of our brains throughout life, documenting how different experiences can dramatically change it. Its most pertinent insight, however, is that we can take control of such transformation. Merzenich’s and Gazzaley’s brain training exercises provide us with a tool to do it. They are a gym for the brain, a place where we can go to strengthen and expand our cognitive capabilities, which, to a very large extent, define who we are and determine what we are capable of.” How far can we go? Makes me which I was younger and get into a field where the possibilities are endless with the brain. It is the new frontier.
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