Can we trust brain training games?

You must have heard of the latest hype about brain training games. The market for cognitive training has lately doubled year on year, exploiting people’s universal desire to maintain their youth and attraction to starts like Nicole Kidman endorsing these games.

This expansion was mostly driven by the popularity of Nintendo’s Brain Age but a quick search has uncovered a lot more programs proliferating on the back of its success, ranging from seniors’ to children’s, some more entertaining than others. “Supermind”, “Cortex Sport”, “Brain Strainer” and “Do the Twist” are some of the ones I came across.

All these games base their claims on the fact that exercising your brain is proven to be useful both to elderly people, people recovering from brain damage as well as children with mental disabilities. However, whether they can actually deliver any significant, long lasting effect of this sort is by no means a certain fact.

As I have not tried Brain Age myself, I searched for others’ experiences of the game. Kaspar Mossman, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of California played it and published his observations in American Scientist. He found the game entertaining, although after a few levels, he noticed shortcuts to trick Dr. Kawashima (the neuroscientist from Tohoku University in Japan playing the instructor in the game) and improve his brain age. Also, he could not assess the level of improvement resulted from playing. Despite these shortcomings, he gave the game some credit as he was able to memorize a phone number which he could not do prior to the training.

You could think this is proof of the benefits of spending £100 on a game that promises to train your mind but this does not demonstrate that it is better than playing chess, watching a documentary or playing Sudoku, all free activities. In fact although scientists have tested this on various groups of people using different approaches, there is no conclusive evidence that the improvements from playing brain training games have superior, long lasting effects on brain functions. I hope you found this article useful and consider these games from all points of view before parting with your money.

For some more information you can check out the articles below featuring some of the scientific attempts at testing the validity of brain training games:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article5587314.ece

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=circuit-training

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-trainers