In “Brain Games Are Bogus” Gareth Cook asserts, unequivocally, that brain training can not make you smarter. He bases this assertion on the result of some meta-analysis done by “a pair of scientists in Europe” who gathered “all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training” from around the world. According to these guys, playing games can make a person good at playing games, “but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.”
Playing games does not, according to Cook, transfer to an increased ability to do arithmetic, or “to other measures of intelligence.” He says these scientists have settled “this controversial issue.”
No, they haven’t.
The “controversial issue” is not whether games improve the mind. The controversial issue is: what exactly is intelligence? Give people many arithmetic tests and they’ll get good at arithmetic tests. Give people many IQ tests and they’ll get good at IQ tests. It’s not the processes that don’t work, it’s the conclusion drawn from the processes.
Gamify these tests, and some factors that lend themselves to learning resistance start to melt away (such as boredom). Cook doesn’t bother to mention this implicit versus explicit motivation. But one of the scientists he’s criticizing does mention motivation, suggesting that we’re only getting half the picture in this analysis of the brain training controversy. Actually, less of the picture—I have on my desktop a list of brain research citations. It’s 500 pages long. It contains a few orders of magnitude more than just 23 studies.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t read the New Yorker. Indeed, the good news is the first comment beneath this blog entry mentions an ongoing study where Catholic nuns are allowing their brains to be examined as they age. So far a direct correlation has been found between brain stimulation and brain health.
Nor am I in the least suggesting Cook is not smart. But I’d love to see what he thinks after playing some brain training games for a few weeks.
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