Brain Stimulation Products - Research Paper Example

One of how scientists have learned how to keep the brain from aging is by engaging it in constructive tasks such as problem-solving, reasoning, etc. Thus, there have been several studies done to see how this can be marketed and what kinds of effects these types of neural stimulation have on slowing down the degeneration of the brain.
One of the most common stimuli that people interact with every day is through the use of technology and communication. Television has been one of the areas that have developed increasingly by offering better types of entertainment options.

This is one of the areas where researchers have been able to see the effect of technology on the brain and development. To achieve this, they used neuroimaging devices to see in what ways and what areas of the brain were stimulated/ not stimulated with the introduction of the television stimulus. In particular, they were looking specifically at memory-timed tasks as a function of watching the news. For the experiment, the experimenters used assessments to establish a baseline on neural patterns before testing. They were made to watch a television news program and then perform a memory-related task.

A functional MRI was used because this type of scan is most effective when looking for changes in blood concentration in the brain. This can tell researchers what parts of the brain are active or where parts of the brain are taking over processing abilities by the change in blood flow. What they found from the research was that certain parts of the brain, which are important to memory, are activated through watching these programs. It was also shown that fluidic memory decreases and crystalline memory increases as a person ages. Watching a television show, it is keeping the brain more active and the connections are being made and which increases the efficiency of the brain. The study cited having high ecological validity by citing that the reason that there is an increase in the amount of crystalline memory is that the brain is trying to compensate for a loss of ability to process through fluidic intelligence due to the cellular decay of certain neural structures. Thus watching television helps keep the brain active and can help slow down the natural neural degradation that everyone experiences (Frings, Mader, & Hull, 2010).

Another popular avenue of being able to produce “younger” brains has been through another portion of the entertainment industry, specifically video games. Recently, the complexity of video games has been increasing offering a wide variety of different cognitive tasks to pull from. One of the main ways in which researchers look at the link between video games and their effects on neural development. In this specific form of research, the speed of processing was of interest in action video games. They ran a correlational analysis comparing reaction times between two groups: a group that had not played a video game and a group that had. From this, they were able to find a correlation of r = 0.99, meaning that this is almost a near-perfect correlation showing how video games can increase the speed of processing of an individual. Thus in another way, it is shown that there are ways to slow and even increase certain aspects of neuropsychology and cognition (Dye, Shawn, & Bavelier, 2009).

Technology and research are the two forerunners when it comes to how businesses can develop and market products that can reduce not only the physical aspects of aging but the mental aspects as well. As more research is done about the brain, more key aspects are discovered, which increases the likelihood of finding ways in which they can be applied. As seen from the two studies above, memory and speed processing are just two of the areas in which scientists concentrate to see how they can affect plasticity with the related neural structures. Read More