Is Brain Training Effective For Improving Your Memory?

When you are researching for strategies to improve your memory, a clear and really interesting option is to participate in brain training games. These are created not only to assist with improving memory , but also to boost your other mental abilities, such as problem-solving. Whenever you play, you definitely get speedier and more accurate and get much better scores in the games. The question that is not often asked is whether or not these game-playing skills are consequently relevant to other elements of your daily life.

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?

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 research team recruited 13000 adult volunteers to take part in their rigorous experiment for six weeks. The purpose was to check out whether exercising the brain on several activities intended to employ different areas of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for mathematics), would boost brain abilities, such as memory and problem-solving abilities.

The volunteers were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The first group did a broad range of brain exercises, including ones for improving memory , for ten minutes every other day for six weeks. Since the tasks were internet-based, the control group just used the internet for the same amount of time. At the end of the trial period, the brain training group was retested on the brain exercises and was found to be 33 per cent better at performing the brain games they had trained on.

This sounds great; but were these enhanced mental skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to general core intellectual abilities, like problem-solving and remembering number sequences? Both groups of subjects were tested on these skills both just before the trial and afterwards. The average score for the two groups at the start of the experiment 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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