Can Brain Training Be Helpful For Improving The Memory?

As we age, we from time to time think that we would like to provide our maybe faltering brain faculties a bit of a supercharge. One way of improving memory and other brain abilities seems to be brain training. This comprises a range of computer-based activities designed to assist you become more skilled at various brain functions such as memory, problem-solving and simple mathematics. Oddly enough though, we are inclined to believe that because we become advanced at performing the brain training games, that these skills are automatically transferable and therefore beneficial in other brain functions that we need to carry out.

You might be forgiven for thinking that all the brain training games have been designed taking the ever-increasing body of brain science into account. Indeed, a lot is already known about the neurological underpinnings of how memory is laid down in the first place, and then improved. Maybe they have been designed this way, but where is the evidence of how successful you can be using these exercises?

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 researchers wanted to find out whether playing a variety of computer-based activities, including memory exercises, over a six week time period, each intended to exercise different areas of the brain, would lead to people in the research to be better equipped to make use of their mental skills in other areas not related to playing brain training games. The experiment included a good cross-section of 13000 of the adult British public.

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 objective of the research was to observe whether becoming experienced at brain training tasks would produce improvement in the same skills when employed in a different circumstance. So both groups of test subjects were tested prior to and following the experiment in their ability to execute tasks 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.

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