Findings Of An Investigation Into Improving Memory By Utilizing Brain Training
As we age, we sometimes feel that we would like to provide our possibly faltering brain faculties a little bit of a boost. One strategy of improving memory and other brain skills appears to be brain training. This consists of a range of computer-based activities developed to help you become better qualified at different brain functions such as memory, problem-solving and simple mathematics. Oddly enough though, we tend to feel that because we get better at performing the brain training games, that these abilities are instantly transferable and therefore helpful in other brain functions that we need to accomplish.
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.
So BBC television in the UK decided to undertake a large-scale study. They teamed up with the Alzheimer’s Society and the British Medical Research Council, and together they came up with a scientific study of the effects of playing brain training games on people’s ability to remember things and other mental skills. The published results were quite surprising.
The research team recruited 13000 adult volunteers to be involved in their rigorous experiment over a period of about one and a half months. The intention was to see whether training the brain on a number of activities engineered to utilize different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for mathematics), would improve brain skills, such as memory and problem-solving abilities.
The volunteers were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The first group did a broad range of brain exercises, including ones for improving memory, for ten minutes every other day for six weeks. Since the tasks were internet-based, the control group just used the internet for the same amount of time. At the end of the trial period, the brain training group was retested on the brain exercises and was found to be 33 per cent better at performing the brain games they had trained on.
This sounds wonderful; but were these enhanced brain abilities transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to general key intellectual abilities, such as problem-solving and remembering sequences of groups of digits? Both groups of volunteers were examined on these abilities both just before the study and as soon as it had ended. The mean score for both groups at the start of the experiment was identical.
Upon retesting at the end of the trial, the control group’s score had improved by 4.35 per cent. Surprisingly however, the score for the experimental group was almost identical. It represented only a 6.52 per cent increase over its original score. So, statistically there was no difference between the two groups. Of course, what they could not conclude was whether the small improvement was just the effect of working online. Perhaps there could have been another group that did nothing online.
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.