Self Improvement Tips Line

It is true that brain training computer games are fantastic fun and when you play them frequently you can certainly get better and better at playing them.  You may well imagine that in playing them, you are doing youe best for improving memory and for enhancing all your other mental abilities.  It is reasonable to assume this, but how do we know that there has really been any progress?  Do we have empirical evidence of the success of these mental exercises?

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.

They enrolled 13000 adult volunteers to be involved in their rigorous experiment over a period of six weeks. The goal was to check out whether exercising the brain on a number of activities developed to use different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would strengthen brain abilities, such as memory and problem-solving skills.

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.

The intention of the research was to see whether getting competent at brain training tasks would bring about improvement in the same skills when employed in a different framework. So both groups of subjects were tested prior to and following the experiment in their capacity to perform tasks such as problem-solving and remembering number sequences.

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?  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.  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.