Â
When you are looking for techniques to improve your memory, a clear and extremely gratifying option is to participate in brain training games. Â These are designed not only to help with improving memory , but also to improve your other mental competencies, such as problem-solving. Â When you play, you undoubtedly get faster and more accurate and get much better results in the tasks. Â The question that is not often posed is whether or not these game-playing abilities are then applicable to other fields in your life.
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. Â Indeed, a lot is already known about the neurological underpinnings of how memory is laid down in the first place, and then improved. Â Maybe they have been designed this way, but where is the evidence of how successful you can be using these exercises?
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.
They enrolled 13000 adult volunteers to get involved in their rigorous experiment for six weeks. The objective was to discover whether exercising the brain on several tasks designed to use different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would enhance mental skills, such as memory and problem-solving abilities.
In accordance with proper experimental design practice, there were two groups of participants in the experiment. Â 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 improving memory . Â 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. Â The control group spent the same amount of time as the others surfing the internet.
This appears great; but were these improved brain skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to normal primary cognitive skills, like problem-solving and remembering number sequences? Both groups of volunteers were tested on these skills both before the experiment and as soon as it had ended. The mean score for both groups at the trial beginning 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.
So if you have been playing these brain training games with the intention of improving your memory, is it time to give them up and put them out to pasture? Â Well, that is entirely up to you, but do bear in mind that studies, no matter what their size, can be flawed and that what does not work for some people could work for you. Â If you really care about improving memory , then there are many other memory strategies you can explore, such as playing sports, taking a look at improving your diet and even going to the odd concert.
Â
