Scientific findings supporting brain training

Interest of scientific communities, towards physiological and psychological benefits of brain training has
gained momentum in recent years. Even though there may be some time before an undisputed consensus
could hold, evidence for brain fitness, improvement, and even damage recovery through cognitive and
other trainings is highly emergent.
Short and Long term Benefits of Cognitive training
Authors: Sussanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Priti Shah (Edited by: Dale Purvies)
Journal : Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences or the United States of America (PNAS)
We trained elementary and middle school children by means of a videogame-like working memory task. We found that only
children who considerably improved on the training task showed a performance increase on untrained fluid intelligence tasks. This
improvement was larger than the improvement of a control group who trained on a knowledge-based task that did not engage
working memory; further, this differential pattern remained intact even after a 3-mo hiatus from training. We conclude that
cognitive training can be effective and long-lasting

Online Source: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/25/10081.abstract

Enhancing the visuo-spatial aptitude of students
Authors: Thomas R. Lord
Journal: Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Volume 22, Issue 5, pages 395-405, May 1985)
The results indicate that statistical improvement in visuo-spatial cognition did occur for the experimental group in spatial
visualization, and spatial orientation. This finding suggests that the weekly intervention sessions had a positive effect on the
students' visuo-spatial awareness. These results, therefore, tend to support those researchers that claim visuo-spatial aptitude
can be enhanced through teaching.

Online Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.3660220503/abstract

Training and Plasticity of Working Memory
Authors: Torkel Klingberg
Journal: Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Volume 14, Issue 7, pages 317-324, July 2010)
Although WM capacity has been viewed as a constant trait, recent studies suggest that it can be improved by adaptive and
extended training.The observed training effects suggest that WM training could be used as a
remediating intervention for individuals for whom low WM capacity is a limiting factor for academic performance or in everyday life.

Online Source: http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(10)00093-8

Benefits for ADD/ADHD
Training of Working Memory in Children with ADHD
Authors: Torkel Klingberg, Hans Forssberg, Helena Westerberg
Journal: Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology (Volume 24, Issue 6, 2002)
Training significantly enhanced performance on the trained WM tasks. More importantly, the training significantly improved
performance on a non-trained visuo-spatial WM task and on Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is a nonverbal complex
reasoning task.A second experiment showed that similar training-induced improvements on cognitive tasks are
also possible in young adults without ADHD. These results demonstrate that performance on WM tasks can be significantly
improved by training, and that the training effect also generalizes to non-trained tasks requiring WM

Online Source: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/.U49cx3KSwW4#.U5EzGXKSwW4

Benefits in fighting Brain cell Degenerative Diseases

Brain Reserve Hypothesis in Dementia
Authors: Laura Fratiglioni, Hui-Xin Wang
Journal: Journal of Alzheimers Disease (Volume 12, Issue1, pages 11-12, 2007)
High education, adult-life occupational work complexity, as well as a mentally and socially integrated lifestyle in late life
could postpone the onset of clinical dementia and AD.

Online Source: http://iospress.metapress.com/content/q7k8100685505261/