Health & Fitness Tools

Conclusions Of An Investigation Into Improving Memory By Utilizing Mental Training Games

2nd August, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

If you are searching for techniques to improve your memory, a clear and really entertaining option is to participate in brain training games. These are intended not only to help with improving memory, but also to enhance your other mental skills, such as problem-solving. When you play, you certainly get quicker and more accurate and get better scores in the tasks. The question that is not often asked is whether or not these game-playing skills are then relevant to other areas 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.

The team enrolled thirteen thousand adult volunteers to get involved in their rigorous experiment for six weeks. The plan was to check out whether training the brain on a variety of tasks intended to employ different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for mathematics), would enhance brain skills, such as memory and problem-solving skills.

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 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 study was to discover if getting competent at brain training tasks would produce improvement in the same skills when used in a different circumstance. So both groups of test subjects were tested prior to and after the experiment in their capacity to perform tasks such as problem-solving and reproducing number sequences.

Upon retesting at the end of the trial, the control group’s score had improved by 4.35 per cent. Surprisingly however, the score for the experimental group was almost identical. It represented only a 6.52 per cent increase over its original score. So, statistically there was no difference between the two groups. Of course, what they could not conclude was whether the small improvement was just the effect of working online. Perhaps there could have been another group that did nothing online.

However, people who enjoy brain exercises should not lose heart. Firstly, speaking from personal experience, if nothing else, they are a lot of fun! Beyond that, even though you should not expect them to help with improving memory, there are certainly a number of other strategies for improving your memory and other mental abilities, which have been scientifically-proven. These include diet, reading, taking physical exercise and listening to music.