Conclusions Of A Study Into Improving Memory By Applying Mental Training

As we age, we occasionally think that we would like to give our possibly failing mental faculties a bit of a boost. One way of improving memory and other mental skills seems to be brain training. This consists of a variety of computer activities designed to help you become more qualified at a variety of mental tasks such as memory, problem-solving and simple math. Interestingly though, we have a tendency to believe that because we progress at playing the brain training games, that these abilities are easily transferable and therefore beneficial in other mental tasks that we need to perform.

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 thirteen thousand adult volunteers to get involved in their rigorous experiment over a period of six weeks. The goal was to check out whether training the brain on a number of tasks engineered to utilize different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would strengthen mental abilities, such as memory and problem-solving skills.

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.

This appears great; but were these superior mental skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to basic core intellectual skills, such as problem-solving and recalling number sequences? Both groups of volunteers were tested on these skills both just before the experiment and afterwards. The average score for the two groups beforehand was identical.

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.

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.