What’s Good for the Heart is Good for the Brain
Our brain is a muscle that needs exercise like the rest of our body. MasterMind Brain Training was developed at River House in Greenwich Connecticut by Lori Contadino. Lori is a Gerontologist and holds a MS in Gerontology and Thanatology previously, Lori was the Manager of The Center for Healthy Aging at the Greenwich Hospital.
Extending brain-training to the affective domain: increasing cognitive and affective executive control through emotional working memory training. The study looked at whether brain-training could improve how people think, especially when it comes to emotions. They trained 45 people using emotional or neutral material or an easy task. They found that training improved how people think, but only training with emotional material helped people control their emotions better. This means that training with material that relates to the situation can be helpful in real life. This study shows that brain-training can be helpful, especially if it involves emotions.1
Short- and long-term benefits of cognitive training. This study looked at whether playing a videogame-like task that improves working memory can also help kids become better at other types of thinking (fluid intelligence). The study found that kids who got better at the working memory task also did better on the other thinking tasks, and that this improvement was bigger than the improvement seen in a control group who did a different kind of task. The good news is that the benefits of the working memory training lasted even after the kids stopped playing the game for 3 months. This means that this type of cognitive training can be helpful for kids, but it’s important to note that not everyone will benefit equally. More research is needed to figure out the best ways to do this kind of training, and who it can help the most.2
1Extending brain-training to the affective domain: increasing cognitive and affective executive control through emotional working memory training
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21949712/
2Short- and long-term benefits of cognitive training
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1103228108
