Leading the field of Brain Fitness market research, Sharpbrains.com co-founders, Alvaro Fernandez and Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg have put out a new text that reinforces the substance of their Sharpbrains website.

Entitled The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness, the text includes brief interviews with neuroscientists, summarizing consumer reviews on brain-fitness software and forecasting future trends in the growing culture that creates and sponsors brain awareness and brain fitness. For those of you who click on Sharpbrains as your daily feed, the book puts into old fashioned black and white format (no pics!) a sampling of the news and essays you’ve touched upon in your daily surf minus Fernandez’s daily blog and the brain teasers. For the newcomer to SharpBrains, you’ll find a straightforward, up to date summary account of the brain fitness field.

Given the authors’ educational focus, the text is programmatic in its overview, offering an authoritative research and clinical perspective on best practices and best products. That is to say, you won’t find the idiosyncratic stories of brain injury offered up by a Norman Doidge nor Carl Zimmer’s sleuthing style of historical writing narrating the birth of neuroscience. Instead you find corporate Web 1.0 speak, designed to take difficult scientific concepts and winnow them down to clear, concise propositions and metaphors, e.g. the “4 Pillars of Brain Fitness.” Now that’s a handy mnemonic device for recognizing the value of a 4 part program which includes balanced nutrition, stress management, physical exercise and mental stimulation. (I’d like to add see the metaphor extended to include a foundation, namely, community.)

Sharp in brains and marketing, Fernandez and Goldberg do acknowledge the issue of community, especially given their focus on addressing the brain fitness needs of the aging baby boom community. But you’ll find along with debunking myths about the brain and promoting brain games and assessment tools for cognitive fitness, the text leans heavily toward promoting high tech, online products for the aging dot.com populous that reaches from Silicon Valley to Bangalore. Where there is attention to offline, low tech learning protocols, slim notes are offered regarding the need for brain fitness tools in clinical settings, e.g., health care providers working with seniors.

Given the popularity of SharpBrains.com, one might wonder, “What’s the value of jumping platforms, especially when the website is so generous with info and opportunities for interactive debate?” One can only surmise that beside the long term bennie of having an ISBN number attached one’s vita or portfolio, the text was intended to draw upon an entirely new audience, one that is not online and another that is dedicated to life long or senior learning. Given the text has received kudos from the American Society on Aging, it seems SharpBrain authors have rightly assessed their niche!

As a learning tool, I’d like to give the book high marks for naming and outlining the brain fitness field though for my money, I think a well designed, text and image product (with legible fonts) could have better served the public at large, especially the design saavy boomers. As both authors are indeed aware, we use the networks of the whole brain to create learning and comprehension and for mass culture today, pictures and well crafted book design capture the collective imagination and embed novel and culturally important ideas. As the old Chinese saying goes, “An image is worth a 1000 words.”

In weeks to come, we hope to interview the SharpBrains authors, giving them a chance to elaborate on their insights and intention for publishing a forecasting text at this time. Stay tuned readers!