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Improving Memory: Are Mental Training Exercises The Solution?

3rd October, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

When you are researching for techniques to improve your memory, an obvious and extremely satisfying solution is to play brain training games. These are developed not only to help with improving memory , but also to develop your other mental skills, such as problem-solving. Whenever you play, you surely get speedier 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 skills are then relevant to other fields in your everyday 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?

So BBC television in the UK decided to undertake a large-scale study. They teamed up with the Alzheimer’s Society and the British Medical Research Council, and together they came up with a scientific study of the effects of playing brain training games on people’s ability to remember things and other mental skills. The published results were quite surprising.

The researchers wanted to discover whether playing a number of computer-based activities, including memory exercises, over a six week period, all developed to exercise different areas of the brain, would cause people in the research to be better able to apply their mental skills in other arenas not related to playing brain training games. The research included 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.

This appears great; but were these enhanced mental skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to general primary intellectual abilities, such as problem-solving and recalling sequences of groups of digits? Both groups of participants were examined on these skills both before the experiment and afterwards. The average score for both groups at the trial beginning 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.

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.