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20 April 2010

Brain training gains modest outside the mind gym

Keeping their brains young

Brain-training software may be a waste of time. People who played “mind-boosting” games made the same modest cognitive gains as those who spent a similar amount of time surfing the web.

“It didn’t really make any difference what people did,” says Adrian Owen of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who tested brain-training software on volunteers recruited through a BBC television programme.

Over the past five years, there has been an explosion in the market for brain-training software, which supposedly keeps the brain youthful. The BBC approached Owen with the idea of testing such software after he wrote a review of the scientific literature on it.

Only a handful of studies existed on the topic, many lacking good controls or enough volunteers, he says. “The scientific evidence for it was extremely weak.”


Trivial search

Owen and his colleagues asked 11,000 volunteers to take tests to gauge their reasoning ability and verbal and spatial memory. Participants then spent six weeks playing on one of two computer programs, or just surfing the web for trivia.

In one program, which mimics commercial brain-training software, the volunteers solved simple mathematics problems and puzzles that tested their memories. The other was designed specifically to boost cognitive abilities such as reasoning and planning.

After six weeks, the participants underwent a second round of cognitive tests. Both groups who played the games made modest improvements, yet so did the web surfers.

Hidden stars

Skills learned via the programs didn’t transfer to the cognitive tests, even when they relied on similar abilities, says Owen. For instance, people who played a game in which they had to find a match for a briefly overturned card struggled at a similar test that used stars “hidden” in boxes.

“Even when the tests were conceptually quite similar we didn’t see any improvement,” says Owen. He concludes that brain-training software only makes people better at the specific tasks they have been practising.

Torkel Klingberg, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, agrees – to a point. “A lot of what is currently marketed as ‘brain-training’ is not created based on scientific evidence and not properly tested,” he says.

Noisy data

Yet Klingberg, who founded a cognitive-training firm called Cogmed, bristles at the conclusion that all brain training is bunk. The participants in Owen’s study didn’t practise for long enough and there was no quality control over what practise people did, he says.

“Asking subjects to sit at home and do tests online, perhaps with the TV on or other distractions around, is likely to result in noisy data,” he says. “This paper does in no way disprove that the brain is plastic or that cognitive functions can be improved by training.”

Owen counters that his team’s research took place in settings similar to the ones people are likely to practise in. “This is what people are doing. They’re sitting at home on their computers doing brain training.”

Journal Reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09042

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