While previously it was believed that the window for brain recovery was at most one year after injury, new research from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published online today in the open - access journal Frontiers in Neurology shows cognitive performance can be improved to significant degrees months, and even years, after injury, given
targeted brain training.
Carefully
targeted brain training programs could reverse the core symptoms of psychosis if the illness is caught early enough, says Sophia Vinogradov at the San Francisco Medical Center.
Not exact matches
While they recorded
brain activity, the team
trained the monkey to move the hands of a virtual representation of itself to follow two moving
targets on the screen (see video, above).
A second group was
trained on mental functions
targeted by commercial
brain -
training programs — short - term memory, attention, visuospatial abilities and mathematics.
These results, published this week by the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, suggest it's possible to
train the
brain like other body parts — with
targeted workouts.
Therefore, you can't directly
train a computer to recognize what context «looks like» in the
brain because context is a continually moving and evolving
target.
As professionals working in this area, we use personalized computer - based
brain -
training protocols to help children and adults improve
targeted skills.
This view of the
brain started to change about 15 years ago, when Israeli neurobiologist Dov Sagi discovered that with intensive
training in specific visual tasks, such as
target orientation (the ability to look at a dot on the wall, look away, then look back at the dot's exact spot), people much older than 12 months could improve their performance in those tasks.
One significant upside of the
training technique is that it can
target specific connections in the
brain that need strengthening, Imamizu said.
The
training is especially
targeted for families with children ages 2 - 5, since 90 % of a child's
brain develops before age 5.
Also, if an ACC marker predicts better response, researchers might develop cognitive
training that specifically
targets this region, which could increase
brain activation to accelerate or boost response to more traditional intervention.
Computer - based
training programs
targeting attention focusing and control has proven to enhance efficiency of the
brain attention system in young children as well as reasoning capacities.14 It has also been shown that classroom curricula that emphasize regulation and executive functions skills, such as Tools of the Mind, 17 improves children's cognitive control.18 But home environment is also important.
The primary objective of the
Brain Games study is to therefore investigate whether cognitive
training delivered online within a «smart gaming» platform is a viable
targeted prevention strategy by examining its ability to reduce psychopathology in young people at high risk for developing a mental illness.