I’ve been mucking about for a few days on a “Brain Training” site - I’m sure plenty of people her have seen them. Basically, the idea is that you play a variety of little flash games supposedly designed to strengthen various area of your brain - memory, speed, spatial awareness, logical thinking, and so on and so forth.
Question is - has it ever been shown that this sort of stuff does any long term good? I certainly played enough Tetris as a kid that I ought to be a whiz at spatial awareness now, but I’m not really sure if playing a bunch of computer games helps you get better at anything except … playing a bunch of computer games.
Has anyone done any research on this? Apart from the people who stand to make money out of my potential subscription, of course.
Actually the BBC in particular seem quite fond of reporting/testing this (and finding it not to produce the results claimed). There was a report again just recently - BBC version here.
There is a pre-published online version of the study if you have access to Nature (464, 21st April 2010), the journal where the research is going to be published.
This is (some of) the abstract:
Mods: I hope that’s not too much quoting, but of course cut it if you need to.
I know it’s only one study, but it’s very recent and 11,430 participants isn’t too shabby, so that’s a start for you, I guess? It seems to be quite a popular area of study actually, if you go through scholar google you can at least see the abstracts of all sorts of relevant stuff, even if you don’t have access to the actual research.
I’m very skeptical about this and the “Brain Gym” and other programs of the sort.
I used to be very involved in juggling, and while I think it’s a wonderful thing for anyone to learn, I never saw any good evidence for crossover. What I mean by that is, some enthusiasts would claim that learning to juggle would improve a kid’s reading skills, or whatnot. I could never find much evidence to support such claims. There was one very small study once (will try to find it later) which did not impress me in its methodology.
Juggling and other novel tasks for the brain are fun and engaging, which is justification enough for doing them. But all the good research (at the time) showed that the more complex a task is, the more specific it is too, and transfer of learning is less likely. So I’m waiting for more evidence.
I didn’t know about google scholar. I had to google it
I’m seeing some stuff that says that they observe improvement in older folks in nursing homes. But I’m thinking they’re probably lacking in stimulation in general - hopefully just leaving your house each day and going to work or whatever (a fair amount of whatever, in my case…) must be worth something in brain-exercise terms.
Oh, it’s a godsend for lazy researchers. Much easier to search than my university’s journal catalogue too!
I think you’re probably right about the older people, any stimulation being better than none. Otherwise the thing seems to be that the games make you better at whatever you’re practising, but don’t have a general cognitive effect.
Here’s a Quarks show (German) where they looked into the common claims of the commercially sold brain jogging programs. As has been mentioned, the simple exercises make you good at … solving simple exercises.
Neurologists (german) say that if you really want to improve your brain by creating new pathways, you should do one or more of the following:
learn and speak a new language
learn and play a musical instrument
learn and do a new sport - dancing is especially good because there’s music added.
All these activate different areas of the brain, as opposed to just training one highly specific path, and offer the most chances of crossing abilities into other areas, which is what you generally want when training.
I believe that these products are piggybacking on real research that shows how complex intellectual activityduring adult life is associated with lesser risk of dementia when older.
The most recent thoughts are that those who regularly engage in complex brain work during adulthood develop a certain amount of cognitive reserve in the form of additional networks of connections that give them go-arounds to use when degeneration occurs. The problem is that eventually the degeneration is enough to swamp the go-arounds and the result is that these complex cognitive workers delay the onset of dementia but that once it hits they decline very quickly.
These games hardly count as “sustained and complex mental activity” (like learning a language, or a musical instrument, or how to dance do) but never let that get in the way of a marketing opportunity!
What DSeid wrote is dead on. This may not be the perfect example of learning new things, but the bottom line is that the older adults get, the more they need to create new neural pathways in the brain (which will eventually defer or retard dementia). The best way of doing this is learning new things in different areas–a new physical activity, a language, dancing, and reading new things, for example. If these little “brain training” games help build lasting pathways among other lines of new learning, then it’s a good thing. You may not really need it at 30, but at 60, things are a lot different.
I don’t have a cite handy, but I read quite recently about studies that showed that PHYSICAL exercise, i.e. running or weight training, is more effective in maintaining mental functioning than is so called ‘brain training’. It may have been on Seth Roberts’s blog.
Chess training is highly correlated with better scores in unrelated tasks. I’ll dig up cites if necessary, but they’re all at home right now.
Anecdotally, I know this is true. I remember in the 5th grade, when I started to take chess seriously, I could simply think…easier. My brain was clearer and I had more “Aha!” moments. I could feel it.
[Personal Anecdote time]. When I first started playing Medieval:Total War, when you shifted your view from one unit to another during a battle, the camera would zoom through the air toward the other unit, while at the same time changing its orientation to the orientation of the other unit. Being suddenly jerked into the air in a rotating trajectory was quite disconcerting for me and quite frankly dizzying.
So disconcerting it was, in fact, that my subconscious brain eventually learned how to calculate beforehand what the rotation and movement was going to look like. My theory is that it was preparing itself so it wouldn’t have to experience the dizziness. It became much less disconcerting after several months of play.
Now, I am much better at imagining rotating and flipping scenes in my head: not just for wargames, but in any situation. I think Medieval:Total War has increased my spatial manipulation abilities without my purposely trying to do so.
IIRC, there’s definitely a correlation with physical activity and delayed onset of dementia, although I’ve never seen anything indicating it’s a stronger indicator (if you remember where you read that, I’d be interested in checking it out). Another predictor found in the Nun Study was early adulthood writing–the denser the ideas in a sample, the more likely dementia would be delayed. I’d be happy to provide an example if anyone’s interested.
