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.

Videogames are increasingly ubiquitous. More and more people around the world are playing games, and not just "boys in basements". Games rival
Hollywood box office revenues year after year. And as
this technology matures, there is a new trend emerging: harnessing the power of this popular medium for more "serious purposes".  Poverty, global conflicts, the
environment.  Why?  Games let people live in new
worlds, try on new behaviors, inhabit roles and
perspectives that are otherwise unavailable to them. 
They can provide rich learning environments for
complex situations, and a safe place for practicing new behaviors.  And they’re deeply engaging.
Games for Change (G4C) is a new organization,
supporting what many people see as a new field: Real World Games with Real World Impact.  Co-founder and President Suzanne Seggerman will give an overview of this new field and will show some of the leading games:
Peacemaker, a game to foster peace in the Middle East; Darfur Is Dying, set in a
Sudanese refugee camp; Food Force, a game created by the UN's World Food
Programme to address world hunger.

Games for Change will also be launching their South Korea chapter at this event.

Mass media plays a vital role in our every day lives.  It is all around us, entering our public and private
worlds in a multitude of forms – many of which are
highly engaging and evocative, unconsciously    
commanding our attention. Like most things in the
world, what we see and hear is often guided by the
hand of desire.  What we want, we get. It is democracy at its most powerful – and that makes it worthy of
serious consideration.  Producers of mass media
have a position of power and responsibility when
communicating their messages to the world.

With the understanding that we are all highly
influenced by the images and sounds we are bombarded with every day, it is a necessity of entertainment providers – especially those of us who aim our work at young people – to thoughtfully consider the moral compass as we deliver messages and information to the world through our chosen medium.  In the end, what are we doing if not using pictures, music and stories to send out to the world an infinite range of personal, political or moral beliefs?

When you consider that LOTR reached hundreds of millions of viewers world wide and other mass media entertainment juggernauts have the capacity to reach across cultures, countries, gender and age it is a dramatic and highly influential tool for communicating morally sound and thought-provoking information.  The medium of film and television will always have the capacity to be one of pure entertainment but also woven into this is the need to tell stories that help inspire young people’s paths through life.