Everything you do changes your brain. Even reading this article. Right now, wherever you are, looking at these words is shaping and changing the connections between neurons inside your head. It sounds surprising, but this process, known as neuroplasty, is fundamental to our ability to learn, new skills, retain old skills, and form new memories.
Imagine if we could take control of this process. If we could target specific types of skills and cognitive processes, then we could teach our brains to be better at everything. This is the idea behind so-called “brain training” apps - by playing different types of puzzles that require, say, you memorize sequences of numbers or focus on finding odd numbers in a group of objects, our general memory abilities will improve and we will better focus on difficult daily tasks. And brain training is big business - for example, the Elevate app costs $ 149.99 for ongoing access.
It would be great if brain training could be used as a quick fix to help boost your cognitive ability, especially in the lead-up to exams. But what does scientific research actually say about this? Are these games effective or not?
The key question is whether our improvement in these games has an impact on skills outside of the game itself - say, is it helping you in your upcoming exams by memorizing numbers more easily. Obviously, if you play a memory game for hours on end, day after day, you get the best results in the game. But being an expert at one particular game is not a useful life skill.
In 2010, a team of scientists led by Cambridge researcher Adrian Owen tried to answer this question. About 11,500 people took part in a massive online study over six weeks, in which they were required to practice a range of different brain training tasks for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week. The tasks spanned the full range of cognitive abilities that brain training programs are trying to improve - such as planning and problem solving, short-term memory, attention, and math skills. Owen's team also completed a set of benchmarking problems before and after the training program. The test items varied, but assessed the same skills taught over six weeks.
If brain training games do lead to an overall improvement in cognitive skills, then one might expect improvements in benchmarking problems as well. But Owen's team found the opposite was actually true. Although the participants showed some improvement in the instructional training tasks, they showed no effect on the benchmarking tasks. In other words, it was evidence that brain training was not working.
But it’s not that simple. For older adults (in the 60+ age group), several recent studies have shown that targeted brain training may show some promise. In 2013, US neurologist Adam Gazzali gathered a group of seniors to play the custom video game NeuroRacer for one hour, three times a week, for a month. In the game, players must keep the car in the middle of the road while simultaneously observing the target symbol - for example, the green circle that appears over the road. In fact, it was a game of being able to do several things at the same time.
Not only did the participants improve their performance in play, they also showed improvement in tests of attention and working memory - abilities that were not directly trained by the game itself. Likewise, in a study published last year in Jamda led by Ann Corbett of King's College London, seniors who used games to train their brains more purposefully for six months showed improvements in reasoning skills.
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Overall, there isn't much clear evidence that brain training works for healthy people. If you download the app for your phone, then most likely you will improve your performance in the game, but you will not see any improvements outside the game itself. All of this means that people should be skeptical about the benefits they might expect from using this kind of application.
So we don't have a quick fix for making our brains smarter. Instead of spending money on brain-training apps to help you pass the exam, it is better to stop playing standard computer games and start learning the exam material.