If you are researching for techniques to improve your memory, an obvious and rather interesting option is to participate in brain training games. These are developed not only to help with improving memory , but also to strengthen your other mental abilities, such as problem-solving. When you play, you certainly get faster and more accurate and get much better scores in the tasks. The question that is not usually asked is whether or not these game-playing abilities are then relevant to other elements of 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.
They intended to discover whether playing a range of computer-based games, including memory exercises, over a six week period, each developed to exercise different areas of the brain, would lead to individuals in the research to be better able to employ their mental abilities in other areas not connected to playing brain training games. The experiment involved a good cross-section of thirteen thousand of the adult British public.
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.
The purpose of the research was to see if getting competent at brain training tasks would result in improvement in the same abilities when used in a different circumstance. So both groups of subjects were tested before and following the experiment in their capacity to accomplish tasks such as problem-solving and remembering strings of numbers.
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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