For many years it was believed that cognitive skills were fixed at birth and immutable throughout
life.  Consequently, it was genetic luck more than
anything that we saw as determining the most
important feature of a young child, its intellectual
potential. 
However, recent brain research demonstrated the
enormous plasticity of the human brain and its ability
to respond to external challenges.  A variety of
mechanisms, which indicate the usefulness of brain
training, have been discovered.  These opened an
entirely new set of opportunities for lifelong
improvement of cognition.

The ability to enhance cognitive skills such as:
attention, perception and memory has direct impact on quality of life, since these basic skills play a role in everything we do.  But nothing can match the importance of training young brains during their formative school years.  For it is then that cognition mediates the entire schooling effort and can significantly augment its impact and successes.

Thus, while the school provides useful new information, the parents, as well as the teachers, can both contribute to the sharpening of the tools that acquire this new information.  Such an investment in advancing basic cognitive skills changes everything. 

CogniFit embarked on developing sophisticated training programs for people of all ages.  These programs share certain basic features.  Chief among them is the need for effective individual assessment, in order to maximize the adaptivity of the training.  It is critical to find the optimal level of challenge for each child.  The interconnectivity between the various elements of cognition is yet another central feature of the training program.  Thus, each training task contributes to more than one specific skill and they reinforce each other.

The lecture will demonstrate the case for cognitive training and illustrate CogniFit’s approach to the problem.