Mind & Creativity

¿Realmente funcionan los juegos para entrenar el cerebro?

Muchos quieren entrenar el cerebro para tener habilidades cognitivas agudas, y los juegos para el cerebro prometen ayudar. Pero, ¿realmente funcionan?


A medida de que pasa el tiempo todo nuestro cuerpo envejece, incluido nuestro cerebro. Las neuronas se mueren y nunca más se regeneran al contrario de otras células del organismo, nuestras funciones cognitivas se deterioran, y más aún cuando se sufre de algún desorden cerebral.

Aquí es cuando aparecen los juegos para el cerebro (como los de Lumosity) que publicitan que están creados para que mejoremos nuestra memoria, evitemos perdidas cognitivas y disminuyamos las posibilidad de mostrar los síntomas de enfermedades como la demencia y Alzheimer. Pero, ¿realmente sirven de algo? La realidad es un poco más complicada.

Neuroplastia y reserva cognitiva

Los juegos para el cerebro basan su efectividad en la teoría de la neuroplastia, lo que consiste en modificar el funcionamiento del cerebro gracias al proceso de aprender cosas nuevas. Se suponía que la neuroplastia sólo funcionaba en niños cuando el cerebro aún se estaba desarrollando, pero gracias a un estudio hecho en el 2004 donde hicieron que adultos aprendieran a hacer malabares, se descubrió que cuando aprendían esta nueva tarea la composición de sus cerebros presentaba cambios físicos a largo plazo, concluyendo que los adultos también presentaban el fenómeno de la neuroplastia.

Los juegos para el cerebro también usan la teoría de la reserva cognitiva como base para decir que funcionan. En pocas palabras, esta teoría explica que mientras más uses el cerebro y mientras más activo lo mantengas, será más difícil que muestres síntomas de declinación cognitiva característicos de enfermedades cerebrales. Seguro has escuchado mucho eso de que “el cerebro es un musculo y hay que entrenarlo”.
entrenar el cerebro

Aprendiendo cosas nuevas

Cuando se mira con cuidado cómo funcionan estos juegos se nota que hacen que el jugador utilice todas sus habilidades cognitivas: memoria, atención, velocidad de procesamiento, capacidades para resolver problemas, etc.,  como herramientas para jugar en escenarios que se vuelven más difíciles de forma progresiva. Entonces, parece obvio que su finalidad es que aprendas nuevas habilidades, que desafíes y que mantengas activo a tu cerebro, y que, por lo tanto, las teorías de reserva cognitiva y neuroplasticidad en adultos en los que se basan sean una manera de evitar síntomas de problemas cognitivos.

Sin embargo, la realidad es que estos juegos solamente entrenan al cerebro para que aprendas a jugar el juego y volverte cada vez mejor, pero, lamentablemente, no te dan habilidades nuevas para resolver problemas que te encontrarás en la vida real. Esta es la conclusión del Centro de Longevidad de Stanford quienes explican que este tema es muy complejo y que los juegos de para el cerebro, como Lumosity, hacen declaraciones que son exageradas y engañosas para que los usuarios gasten dinero en una suscripción, algo que es irresponsable porque no se ha demostrado científicamente que este tipo de juegos son efectivos para eliminar síntomas de problemas cognitivos.

Al mismo tiempo, ellos dicen que este tipo de juegos pueden funcionar, en algunos casos, para mejorar la memoria y el funcionamiento del cerebro en general, pero que en otros individuos las nuevas habilidades se disipan con el tiempo.



Qué se puede hacer para mantener el cerebro funcionando todo el tiempo

Si lo tuyo es jugar, se demostró en un estudio del 2014 que jugar Portal 2 es mucho más efectivo para mejorar el rendimiento del cerebro al momento de resolver problemas, aprender persistencia y habilidades espaciales.

Otros consejos comunes para hacer que el cerebro se mantenga sano es salir a caminar (o hacer otros ejercicios), aprender un nuevo lenguaje, tener un pasatiempo y comer de manera equilibrada.

FUENTE:¿Realmente funcionan los juegos para entrenar el cerebro? por Gabriela González via blogthinkbig.com (CC BY SA)

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Imágenes via pixabay, licenciadas bajo dominio público (CC0)

 

Culture, Design & Disrupt 

"100 years of Beauty 
in 1 minute"

The Changing Beauty of  woman by cut

Time lapse of a model getting her hair and makeup done to match every decade from 1910 to 2010.  100 Years of Changing Beauty, Makeup, and Hairstyles in 1 Minute of USA, Italy, India, Korea, Russia, Mexico, Iran, Germany and Philippines . 

 

Innovation & Creativity

¿Se puede Gestionar el Optimismo?

Marita Abraham en TEDxUTN

¿Puede realmente ser gestionado algo tan intangible como el Optimismo? para dilucidar esta fascinante interrogante la Conferencista, Coach y Consultora Internacional Marita Abraham nos expone en una vibrante charla  TEDx su visión y experiencia,  invitándonos a ver la vida con otros ojos, con los del optimismo, viéndolo no solo como una actitud sino como una filosofía que nos moviliza a generar cambios que nos ayuden e impulsen a realizarnos en nuestra vida.



 
 

ART is BEAUTY... photo via pixabay licensed under CC0

Science & creativity

"A promising test for pancreatic cancer from a teenager"

Jack Andraka at  Ted talks

Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than two percent chance of survival. How could this be? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that's super cheap, effective and non-invasive — all before his 16th birthday.

Jack Andraka created a Cancer detector, which is a paper on carbon nanotubes, a biology lecture on antibodies and a flash of insight led 15-year-old Jack Andraka to design a cheaper, more sensitive cancer detector.

Happy 125th anniversary of 
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architecture & innovation

"Innovative Spaces" 

Adam Price

By Adam Price via  Nesta.org.uk

Space matters. It affects the way we work, think and interact. That’s why building environments that encourage creative collaboration has become a central issue for organisations and city planners globally.  From the corporate Googleplex to the startup accelerator and the innovation campus, billions are being spent on the innovative work-scapes of the future.

The ‘architecture of innovation’ is not itself anything new.  Sixty years ago biologist Jonas Salk claimed his discovery of the polio vaccine only came when he swapped his basement lab for an Italian monastery which eventually became the template for the iconic Louis Kahn-designed Salk Institute.  Yet uninspiring architecture can still be great idea generators from MIT’s leaky Building 20 to the garage startups of Silicon Valley.     

ART & CREATIVITY

Classic Art & Pop Culture

"Nastya Nudnik – Emoji Nation"

 by Lucael via Collater.al (CC BY)

Nastya Nudnik is a young Ukrainian artist who created these works by inserting the windows pop-up windows and icons of social networks in some of the most famous paintings in art history.

Innovation & Creativity

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Tras la gran acogida de “1 IDEA PARA CAMBIAR LA HISTORIA 2014”, el canal History anunció el lanzamiento de la segunda edición de este concurso que busca potenciar el talento, la creatividad y la innovación de los latinoamericanos.  En esta nueva cita, se pretende seguir despertando el interés de la gran comunidad de emprendedores de la región, buscando aprovechar al máximo su potencial y espíritu innovador, motivándolos a que compartan y den a conocer ante el mundo sus iniciativas.

 

Education & infographic

"How Technology Is Shaping The Future Of Libraries

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Rock N'roll
The Gathering 
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CREATIVITY & INSPIRATION

18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

"

 by Scott Myers  via Creativitypost.com

Scott Myers

Image:  Gazer by Marina Ćorić (CC BY NC ND)

Scott Myers digs into Carolyn Gregoire's 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently and his past to illuminate his own creative path.

Believe it or not, I'm not writing this just because it cites the work of Creativity Post co-founder, Scott Barry Kaufman, and senior editor, Rebecca McMillan, on daydreaming in the article. I’m also posting it in response to my lifelong fascination with why creative people are the way they are… and frankly, why I am the way I am.  See FULL ARTICLE via Creativitypost.

Open Music & Creativity

The Specials "Nelson Mandela"

Musical Tribute to a Legend.

The song in tribute to Nelson Mandela and the cause of freedom in the early 1980s made us feel we were part of something much bigger than the sum of its parts.  In December 2013, following the news of Nelson Mandela's death, the single re-entered at number ninety six on the UK Singles Chart. Music video by The Special AKA performing Nelson Mandela.

 

Creativity & Open Photography

How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos

 

According to our research, more than 90% of Creative Commons photos are not attributed at all. To make matters worse, less than 10% of the photos that do credit the original work are attributed properly. This means that more than 99% of Creative Commons photos are not adequately attributed.

Not without pride, we are happy to notice that most of the bloggers using Foter.com attribute CC photos properly, which is greatly facilitated by our “ready to paste” attribution info. Every time they intend to use a searched image, all they need to do is copy the image and the accompanying attribution details into their blogs.

Open Creativity

  Nikola Tesla "The RockStar of Science" Quotes

in honor of his 157th birthday

"Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine." Nikola Tesla

 

 

 

Creativity & Disrupt 

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1.There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 
2.Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3.There is no editing stage.
4.Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5.Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6.The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7.Once you're done you can throw it away.
8.Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9.People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10.Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11.Destruction is a variant of done.
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image 1: "Done Manifesto" by James Provost (CC BY NC ND)

image 2: "Cult of Done" by Joshua Rothhaas (CC BY)

Source: http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html

 

Sustainability and Business

Empresas B “La Oportunidad de Crear un cambio”

Maria Emilia Correa en TEDxSantiago

En esta Charla TED la Experta en Sostenibilidad  María Emilia Correa expone como las B Corps han abierto las puertas a un nuevo tipo de empresas ¨Las que no compiten por ser las mejores del mundo, sino que por ser las mejores para el mundo¨  creado una gran oportunidad que favorece la innovación y el emprendimiento social. Estas empresas nos Invitan a tomar una posición distinta  frente a esta nueva redefinición del éxito, la cual se centra en la Sustentabilidad, colaboración y en las personas,  creando un cambio positivo para el mundo.  Las B Corps están cambiando la forma que se entienden las compañías, ya que ponen el foco en generar beneficios sociales y ambientales …Una Revolución que comienza a ganar terreno en todo el mundo.

 

"The Corruption of Happiness"

by William Davies via opendemocracy.net

 

Anger and injustice need hearing, not treating. Unhappiness can be healthy.

Gary Becker, who died last year, should be considered one of the most influential thinkers of our times. A leading member of the Chicago School of economics since the 1960s, his influence has been far more pervasive and subtle than that typically attributed to economists.

Where many high-profile economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Summers get to shape how specific public policies are made, Becker's legacy has been a more profound and ethical one. In a sense, he has shaped how human beings are made.

Becker was a pioneer of what has come to be known as 'economic imperialism'—the extension of neo-classical economics into new, seemingly non-economic territories. This includes areas such as the family and education, which Becker analysed using the transformative concept of 'human capital'.

Human capital is a relatively familiar term nowadays, and has been a critical concept in the justification for tuition fees in the UK, as Andrew McGettigan has explored. Yet the idea that humans are a type of capital was controversial when it first appeared. As Becker put it in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, "until the 1950s, economists generally assumed that labour power was given and not augmentable". His concept of human capital changed all that.

What Becker was highlighting was that people make various life choices, which have a significant impact on their economic fates. "In human capital theory", he argued "people rationally evaluate the benefits and costs of activities, such as education, training, expenditures on health, migration, and formation of habits that radically alter the way they are." [italics added]

As Michel Foucault noticed with brilliant prescience in his 1978-79 lectures on neoliberalism, Becker's theory provided a template for how individuals have come to view their own lives. Education becomes a strategic investment in oneself. Relationships are economic contracts, with costs and benefits for each party. And we are increasingly conscious that our diets, exercise regimes, sleep and relaxation influence how attractive we appear and how effectively we work. The underlying implication of Becker's work is as much existential as it is economic: each of us decides how successful they wish to be.

Habits and behaviors of the mind (or brain) can now be added to this roster of choices. Mindfulness, digital detoxing, cognitive behavioral therapy, self-help and evidence-based relaxation techniques (such as spending more time near foliage) are all premised on the idea that people are, in Becker's word, 'augmentable'. The feelings that they have can be altered, if not by the solitary individual concerned, then with the help of a therapist, digital app, wearable technology or some combination thereof.

This becomes most manifest in the positive psychology mantra that happiness is a 'choice', something now picked up by Coca-cola with their #choosehappiness marketing campaign. It's possible that this idea can provide a momentary uplift to someone coping with mild depression. But it seems far more likely to motivate those who already have power to shape their own circumstances, namely the rich and healthy.

For example, it is the central idea of the management guru Shaun Achor, who explains to businesses and individuals how they can achieve an 'advantage' over their rivals through strategically building their own happiness. The neuroeconomist Paul Zak suggests that happiness is a 'muscle' that we must remember to exercise regularly, to keep it in good working order. Supported by a growing armory of mood-tracking apps and stress-monitoring wristbands, emotions are now something to be included in our workout routines.

What is perplexing about this deeply individualistic worldview is that the measurement of happiness has, in the past, been used to pursue a very different type of political agenda. The measurement of happiness at a national level was first attempted in the mid-1960s, and was soon a central technique within the 'social indicators' movement, which seeks to offer an alternative to materialistic, market-based notions of value. The work of the UK think tank The New Economics Foundation demonstrates the terrific ingenuity that often characterizes this project.

National happiness indicators, which are now collated by many official statistical agencies, can provide an important basis for political critics and campaigners. They highlight the psychological damage that is done by highly competitive, unequal and privatized economic systems. That said, it is worth recognising that often this data simply quantifies things that we had long suspected. Freud famously observed that "love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness". Happiness economists have confirmed that unemployment and lack of family time are both very damaging to life satisfaction.


How is it that a transformative, progressive political agenda has morphed into a new form of behavioral management? The problem is that quantification and economics are never innocent in all of this. By reducing the relationship between mind and world to a quantitative ratio, wellbeing metrics offers a simple choice of how to pursue progress: do you seek to change the world or to change the mind? The philosophical relationship between critical subjectivity and objective circumstances comes to appear like a set of scales to be balanced, in which the weight on either side can be adjusted.


There are plenty of critics who employ happiness data to demand a change in our political economy. The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is one of the most prominent cases of this, focusing on inequality. Psychologists such as Tim Kasser have developed their own measurement tools to demonstrate the negative impact of materialistic, competitive cultures on our wellbeing. But they appear to be in a shrinking minority. Why? The answer brings us back to Gary Becker.


At the core of both neoliberal thought and US culture is the belief that the central questions of political organisation have already been answered. They are therefore beyond the scope of political transformation or democratic debate. Just as the US constitution seeks to provide the 'rules of the game' that any American has to play by, so neoliberals have sought to entrench free market capitalism as the only 'game' available—the German neoliberal, Franz Böhm, even spoke in terms of establishing an 'economic constitution.’ Anyone can succeed or fail, but to do so, they first have to accept that the game itself is permanent.


In this context, the question of political or economic transformation becomes forcefully thrust back upon the individual. Given that capitalism cannot be transformed to meet human needs, humans will have to transform themselves to meet capitalist needs. Gurus such as Achor or Zak provide this philosophy with its optimistic, smiling face: I changed myself, and so can you!


But in the murky world of workfare 'behavioral activation' programmes, it takes on a more punitive dimension. The idea of 'entrepreneurship' may summon up heroic visions of Steve Jobs, but for many more people it means having to be entirely amenable to the fluctuating demands of capital, on a quite fundamental and personal level. When professions such as journalism become prefixed with the word 'entrepreneurial', this means one thing only: augment yourself or die.


Political hope must continue to lie in the idea that social and economic conditions are changeable, and, commensurately, that it is not up to us to tailor our minds, moods and bodies to circumstances which dominate us. The problem is that this argument can easily be bracketed as a form of idealism, which—in contrast to the advocates of 'talking cures'—doesn’t take everyday suffering seriously. The critique of positive psychology can end up being dismissed as a nonsensical defence of negativity.


The way to resist this is to insist on a political understanding of happiness and unhappiness, in which people are authorised to articulate and offer explanations for their feelings. This means understanding that some forms of unhappiness - such as a sense of injustice or anger - need hearing, not treating. This in turn requires careful nurturing and development of the institutions which facilitate voices to be heard. Happiness is welcome, but not if it requires people to "radically alter the way they are".

William Davies's new book, The Happiness Industry: How the government & big business sold us wellbeing is published by Verso.

Source: "The corruption of happiness" by William Davies via opendemocracy.net (CC BY NC)

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. If you have any queries about republishing please contact with opendemocracy.net.

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• About the author

  William Davies is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. His weblog is at www.potlatch.org.uk and his new book is The Happiness Industry: How the government & big business sold us wellbeing (published by Verso).
  
  
  IMAGE 1: "Darama, comedy & Theater" via pixabay.com (CC0), Public Domain licensed.
  
  
  IMAGE 2: "happy hour-neon" via pixabay.com (CC0), Public Domain licensed.