Take up Music, Prevent Alzheimer's?

Over at RedNova, they just ran an article about "using or losing" your mental skills with a bit of a twist - learning to play an instrument. A study from Illinois is suggesting that study participants achieved a 50 to 70% improvement in their memory over a period of 18 months during which time they learned to play a new instrument.

The scientific underpinning would seem to be the observation that short-term memory was improved for these individuals. Some researchers beleive that short-term memory strengthening can lead to delay or in some cases prevention of Alzheimer's.

Here is the story:

Cognitive Labs in Singapore

As part of our Gamer-IQ project, which uses some of the things we know and can measure about human cognition and puts them to the test with gamers--it looks like we'll be headed to Singapore in November for the world championships of the World Cyber Games, which pit thousands of gamers against each other from around the world. I'll be posting some of the media links which are from Forbes, MSNBC, Fortune, etc. mostly over on my other blog, GamerIQ . Not only do we have a corporate invitation for this elite group of global companies, we'll also be there as a regular blogger.