Do Brain-Training Games Actually Work? It’s Complicated

Brain-training games may have cognitive benefits — but exactly what they are is a matter of debate. Peter Dressel/Tetra images/Getty Images

Some 2.3 million U.S. adults over 65 — more than 4% — have a diagnosis of dementia . But even without a diagnosis, a certain amount of cognitive decline is normal as age sets in.

Whether it’s due to fear of cognitive decline or noticing lapses in cognition when we are stressed, many of us have had moments when we thought we could use an extra cognitive boost.

The good news is research has shown that people can make changes throughout adulthood that can help prevent or delay cognitive decline and even reduce their risk of dementia. These include quitting smoking and properly managing blood pressure.

In addition to these lifestyle changes, many people are turning to brain-training games, which claim to optimize your brain’s efficiency and capacity at any age. The makers of brain-training apps and games claim their products can do everything from staving off cognitive decline to improving your IQ .

But so far, these claims have been met with mixed evidence .

We are cognitive neuroscientists who focus on brain health across the adult lifespan. We study how the brain informs cognition and the ways we can use brain imaging to understand cognitive and brain-training interventions. We aim to understand how our brains change naturally over time, as well as what we can do about it.

Ongoing research shows what actually happens to the brain when it is engaged in new learning, offering a window into how people can sustain their brain health and how brain-training games can play a role. We believe these studies offer some strategies to train your brain the right way. The Truth About Brain Training

Brain training is a set of tasks, often computerized, based on well-known tests to measure a type of cognition, but in a gamified manner.

Most brain-training games were designed to help participants master one or more specific skills. One example is a game that shows you a letter and number combination, where sometimes you must quickly identify whether the letter is even or odd, while other times you must switch to deciding whether the letter is a consonant or vowel. The game may increase in difficulty by requiring you to accomplish the task within a set time limit.

Such games are designed to require a high level of attention, fast processing speed, and a flexible mind to alternate between the rules, which is known as executive functioning .

However, it turns out that the specific skills learned in these games often do not translate to more general, real-world applications. Whether brain games meet their end goal of lasting cognitive improvement across a number of areas is still highly debated among psychologists . To make such claims requires rigorous evidence that playing a specific game improves cognitive or brain performance.

In 2016, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission issued a US$50 million penalty to one of the most popular brain-training games at the time, Lumosity, for misleading consumers into thinking that they could achieve higher levels of mental performance at work or at school and prevent or delay cognitive decline by using its product.

If improving on a brain game helps the player get better only at that or highly similar games, maybe game developers need a different approach. Improving our brain function is possible, even if many of the claims made by developers of brain-training games are unsupported by scientific evidence. Challenge Yourself

In a study dubbed the Synapse Project , in which one of us, Ian McDonough, helped assess the final outcomes, one group of participants was tasked with engaging in a new activity with which they had little experience. They were assigned to either digital photography or quilting. Though these activities were not games, they were meant to be engaging and challenging and done in a social environment.

Another group was assigned activities that involved little active learning, such as engaging in themed activities related to travel or cooking, or more solitary activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, listening to music, or watching classic movies. These groups met for 15 hours a week over 14 weeks. All participants were tested at the beginning and end of the study on various cognitive abilities.

Those assigned to the new, challenging activities showed significant gains in their memory, processing speed, and reasoning abilities relative to those assigned to the less challenging activities. None of the participants were directly trained on these cognitive tests, which means that the challenging activities enhanced skills that transferred to new situations, such as remembering a list of words or solving abstract problems.

Brain scans of participants showed that over the course of the study, those engaged in the more challenging activities increased their neural efficiency . In other words, their brains didn’t have to work as hard to solve problems or recall information.

The study also showed that the more time participants spent on their projects, the bigger their brains gained and the better their memory was at the end of the 14 weeks.

One difference between the types of activities engaged in the Synapse Project and traditional brain training is whether activities are done in a group or alone. Although other studies have found a benefit to social interaction, the Synapse Project found no difference between the social and solitary activities in the low-challenge group. So, challenge rather than the social components seems to be the driver of maintaining cognitive and brain health. Get Your Brain Healthy

You might be thinking it’s time to take up digital photography or quilting. But in the end, it’s not about those specific tasks. What matters most is that you challenge yourself, which often comes naturally when doing something new. Learning a new skill, alone or in a social setting, is proven to improve cognition. Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/DigitalVision via Getty The new learning that is often accompanied by a sense of effort – and sometimes frustration – requires accessing the resources in the frontal lobe […]

Read more at www.inverse.com