Can Brain Training Be Helpful For Improving Your Memory?
If you are searching for techniques to improve your memory, an obvious and really entertaining possibility is to play brain training games. These are designed not only to help with improving memory , but also to boost your other mental skills, such as problem-solving. Whenever you play, you surely get speedier and more accurate and get better results in the tasks. The question that is not usually posed is whether or not these game-playing skills are then relevant to other fields in your everyday life.
The multi-million dollar brain training games industry would no doubt claim that its mental exercises are based on sound neurological theory and that therefore there is a reasonable possibility of improving your memory and other skills through using its mind exercise software. They have not however, at least to my knowledge, published the results of any studies that they have made into this area.
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.
The team recruited 13000 adult volunteers to take part in their rigorous experiment for about one and a half months. The plan was to check out whether exercising the brain on several tasks developed to employ different areas of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for mathematics), would boost mental faculties, such as memory and problem-solving capabilities.
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 improving 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 seems wonderful; but were these improved brain skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to basic key cognitive capabilities, like problem-solving and remembering sequences of groups of digits? Both groups of volunteers were tested on these skills both before the trial and immediately afterwards. The mean score for the two groups at the trial beginning was the same.
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.
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