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luckmervil
Activities build 'a stronger neural network that is less susceptible to dementia'
Technology marketer Penny Wilson first became interested in brain fitness when her father-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
When by chance she met the CEO of FitBrains, a Vancouver-based gaming company, his knowledge about current brain science fired her entrepreneurial impulse. This January, just a year later, Wilson opened nognz, her West Vancouver brain-fitness store, with five employees.
“I think it’s really important to make people aware that what science used to tell us is as you age, your brain slowly degenerates,” Wilson said. “But in the last 10 years, they’ve proven no — you can rebuild your brain just like you can rebuild other muscles in your body. As a marketer, I saw an opportunity to really communicate with people that there are things they could do.”
The key to brain fitness is to keep your brain doing things that are novel and complex, Wilson said. Try to push yourself in five key areas of brain function: Critical thinking, memory, focus, coordination and word skills.
“It’s like working out,” Wilson said. “If you don’t push yourself to do that one extra pushup, you never improve.”
But don’t just limit yourself to games and puzzles. Creating a healthy brain also requires good physical fitness and nutrition, stress management and socialization, she said. “Stress actually kills your brain cells,” Wilson said.
So Wilson’s concept is a bricks and mortar store that encourages multiple aspects of brain fitness. In addition to selling games, puzzles and software, nognz has a small “brain bar” that sells supplements, green teas, dark chocolates, nuts and cookbooks. Loneliness increases risk of dementia in later life, so Wilson is trying to build a social atmosphere in her 1,250-square-foot store. The idea is customers can come, sip tea, play with games and puzzles, buy products, or take classes in meditation, memory boot camp and bridge.
That’s not to say she’s ignoring ecommerce. She’s just launched a new website to sell products, and to develop an online community area for questions and answers, a goal tracker with online brain exercises, and a brain health plan.
“As our population continues to age, we will see greater demand for validated brain fitness tools and product. There is no other brain fitness store in Canada,” Wilson said. In the U.S., there is a similar concept store in San Francisco and another in Chicago.
In order to add value and credibility, Wilson hired Justin Davis as product manager and scientific director. Davis, who holds a doctorate in neuromechanics and a master’s degree in neuroscience, said while going online and playing a brain training game makes you good at that game, it doesn’t necessarily improve skills for daily life, so it’s important to take a comprehensive approach to brain fitness. In other words, don’t just do crosswords.
“We used to think our brains were hardwired entities like your computer,” Davis said. “We’ve learned our brains are malleable and adaptive.”
Brain fitness activities build brain reserve. “You can actually build a stronger neural network that is less susceptible to a pathology like dementia,” Davis said. “You have more brain resources available physically and therefore the effects of dementia are less pronounced.”
The latest evidence in brain research indicates that “exercising” the brain will not prevent Alzheimer’s disease, according to a recent article in The Journal of Active Aging by Alvaro Fernandez and Pascale Michelon. Brain fitness is not so much about disease prevention, but about using frequent stimulation to make the brain more efficient and more resistant to damage.
Wilson and her husband self-funded the startup business.
Wilson has an aggressive expansion plan and is already looking to open a second retail store in a mall, possibly White Rock or Coquitlam, to be quickly followed by either franchising or raising capital for corporate store growth. She hopes to have locations across the country in five years.
Wilson’s staff is visiting seniors’ centres, schools and fitness clubs to introduce her products. She hopes to partner with groups by putting up a brain fitness shelf in their classrooms, lunch rooms and fitness clubs which she will restock with new product every quarter.
This shelf subscription service will launch in September with an installation fee and an annual subscription. Consumers and instructors would also be pointed to the store.
Wilson said the worldwide market for brain fitness software alone is estimated at $300 million US today, but is forecast to reach $4 billion US by 2015. Her key target is baby boomers and early seniors, primarily women as they are the gateway to the rest of the household. For women, the No. 1 fear is cancer, but the No. 2 fear is memory loss, Wilson said. Women represent 72 per cent of Alzheimer’s disease victims and one in eight baby boomers will develop some form of dementia in later life.
Wilson has run a business before, as president of Toronto-based 3-D computer graphics firm Alias Research, but nognz is her first foray into retail. Surprises have included the spring break lull, and the high cost of rent.
“We are a weather-driven location. On sunny days we see business pick up significantly,” she said. “We’re hoping to have our online presence drive a portion of the business and hopefully our subscription business starting in the fall.” Average product prices run $30 to $50.
Women who walk in pretty much go directly to the memory shelf, she said.
“People want to recall information. Words are getting caught at the end of the tongue. They can’t remember people’s names. As people get a bit older, they become more socially anxious about finding those words. We sell a lot of word skills games.”
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