Game Day at the Brain Fitness Center

By Jayne Davis, DCoE Strategic Communications

The veteran walks onto the playing field - game face on. But there’s no standard athletic equipment here, no bats, no balls, no clubs. Instead, the equipment is a chair and a computer.

Like physical competitive play, speed, accuracy, agility and strategic thinking will be tested. Unlike physical play however, only the mind, not the body, will be put through the paces.

This is tough stuff with a formidable opponent: the brain. This particular veteran has a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and he’s about to voluntarily spend repeated, small chunks of time playing games with his mind.

The setting is the Brain Fitness Center. It’s a small room with a half-dozen computers running programs that sound and look like video games. Veterans and active-duty service members who have difficulty remembering things, trouble focusing or paying attention – all possible cognitive symptoms of TBI – “play” with shapes, pictures, sounds, paired associations, speech patterns, puzzles and a host of programs to stimulate visual processing, critical thinking, language, calculation and other brain functions that can challenge veterans with TBI.

The games are meant to be fun and entertaining ways to stimulate the brain. On some days, however, the games can be as grueling as any physical workout.

Housed inside the Military Advanced Training Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Brain Fitness Center is one program the Defense Department is using to help veterans with TBI. The center is part of the Walter Reed TBI program, which incorporates more than 12 different components to address this multifaceted injury with a broad spectrum of symptoms and disabilities.

The computerized brain training program is meant to supplement traditional rehabilitative therapies. “This is a complex issue,” said Dr. Louis French, a neuropsychologist and clinical site director for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a component center of Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE). ‘‘We must have multiple interventions,” he said.

The center has a library of products, some developed in a clinical setting and others that come from the commercial market. Access to the products comes by appointment at the center, take-home software, web-based technology and hand-held devices, all of which allow service members and veterans to train wherever they have a computer and an Internet connection.

Though many users say they’ve found help and improvement with these products, brain training remains experimental. Kathleen Sullivan, speech pathologist and director of the Brain Fitness Center, says research shows that the brain can continue to learn and become stronger at any age. But the research is still out on definitive claims of success in treating TBI.

Michael Merzenich is a neuroscientist and co-founder of Posit Science, which makes one of the brain training programs used at Walter Reed and other military and veterans’ hospitals. He admits that although brain training programs have not been scientifically tested on brains, let alone injured brains, he believes they are helping. “[It] doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be in the tip-top shape they were in before they went over to Afghanistan,” he says, “but most of the people can be substantially better.”