There is no denying that brain training computer games are great fun and if you participate in them regularly you can undoubtedly get better and better at playing them. You might believe that by playing them, you are doing youe best for improving memory and for sharpening up all your other brain functions. It is fair to make this assumption, yet how do we know for sure that there has truly been an improvement? Do we actually have scientific evidence of the success of these mental exercises?
The multi-million dollar brain training games industry would no doubt claim that its mental exercises are based on sound neurological theory and that therefore there is a reasonable possibility of improving your memory and other skills through using its mind exercise software. They have not however, at least to my knowledge, published the results of any studies that they have made into this area.
Well, recently the very revealing results of a large UK study into the effectiveness of brain exercises on improving memory etc. have been published, and they are probably not what you would have predicted. BBC television conducted this research in conjunction with the British Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer’s Society.
The research team recruited 13000 adult volunteers to be involved in their rigorous experiment for six weeks. The plan was to check out whether exercising the brain on a number of activities intended to employ different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for mathematics), would improve mental faculties, such as memory and problem-solving capabilities.
In accordance with proper experimental design practice, there were two groups of participants in the experiment. Volunteers were randomly assigned either to the experimental or the control group.
The experimental group spent ten minutes a day for six weeks playing a set of brain training games designed to exercise a large spectrum of mental skills including memory. When retested at the end of the study, their ability to perform the brain games they had trained on had improved by a third, against their initial performance in them. The control group spent the same amount of time as the others surfing the internet.
The purpose of the study was to discover if becoming competent at brain training activities would produce improvement in the same skills when used in a different circumstance. So both groups of subjects were tested before and after the experiment in their capacity to carry out activities such as problem-solving and remembering number sequences.
If you believe that brain training games can play a part in improving memory, then you might find the results a little surprising. There was actually a small improvement in the performance of both groups and what’s more this improvement was virtually identical in the two groups. So even though there was some improvement, the lack of statistical significance between the two sets’ results means that this could not be attributed to the training.
However, people who enjoy brain exercises should not lose heart. Firstly, speaking from personal experience, if nothing else, they are a lot of fun! Beyond that, even though you should not expect them to help with improving memory, there are certainly a number of other strategies for improving your memory and other mental abilities, which have been scientifically-proven. These include diet, reading, taking physical exercise and listening to music.
