Defending Brain Training

We’re pro brain-training at The Great Brain Robbery, so when we see articles that suggest brain-training doesn’t “work,” we’re a bit biased. We offer this self-description as a form of full disclosure before proceeding to the following discussion.

An article at Science Daily (a website we have much respect for and read every day) reports on a study forthcoming in Psychological Science. This study assigned older adults to one of two groups: one group learned new skills such as photography, while the other were tasked with listening to music and doing puzzles at home. Both groups included subjects who were assigned social tasks to mitigate for such an effect. Researchers found that those who where assigned to learn a new skill had better memory improvement.

The article quotes the scientists as saying “It seems it is not enough just to get out and do something -- it is important to get out and do something that is unfamiliar and mentally challenging …. When you are inside your comfort zone you may be outside of the enhancement zone.”

This makes sense, and is very encouraging, because for anyone with a brain, there should be a world of challenges available to keep the mind sharp. And while playing video games is not the same as taking an eight-week course on Taiwanese Dessert Decorating, at least games can still be challenging, and importantly, readily available.

But, we want to point out that his study does not mention a control group of subjects who did neither the skill-seeking activities nor the home puzzle activities. So while, yes, while learning basket weaving on a three-week trip through Namibia would probably be very good for the brain, this doesn’t mean that challenging yourself to play brain training games wouldn’t.

Note also that the article calls listening to music and doing puzzles “non-demanding mental activities.” We especially disagree with this assertion, in as much as doing crossword puzzles can be merely an “exercise” (like, on a Monday) whereas anyone who’s noodled through a Friday New York Time crossword puzzles knows how challenging—and stimulating, not to mention rewarding—it can be to finish one.

So the take-away we’re going to agree-upon with this research is that: more research needs to be done. And in the meantime, there is no good reason to play games. And fun is its own reason.

Education and our Malnourished Brains

Are we getting smarter? A bunch of smart people got together and found that, no, we’re not.

For a very specific and compelling definition of “we,” that is. The gap between the academic performances of haves and have nots is growing, at least in the US. And while certainly we, as a nation, like to point at the outliers, evoke the notion of rugged individualism, and then, ironically, say “look how great we are,” the truth is that the majority of people in this country are not performing at their full potential.

A report by Jonathan Plucker, Jacob Hardesty, and Nathan Burroughs, called “Talent on the Sidelines,” says that we are losing the minds of our school children. They studied a variety of education assessments, and found that while there has been an increase in the scores of white and well-off students, minority and poor students are, at best, performing at the same levels as 15 years ago, in in some states, their doing worse.

Plucker et. al say that this means we have a “permanent talent underclass.” And it is difficult, in the face of this, not to consider the political environment that has led to this condition. Underfunding of education. The downsizing and removal of school nutrition programs. Even something like the cost of healthcare can keep parents out of the home, working over time to pay for a meager lifestyle, instead of being able to spend time in the home, participating in their children’s education.

And it’s a viscous cycle—underperforming school children become underpaid adult workers, who have children that enter the same broken education environment.

What can we do? According to Plucker et al, one thing we can do is start making excellence a focus. Rather than spend billions on assessing and cultivating achievement minimums, forcing educators to teach to an arbitrary standardized test, we should start working on ways to move underachievers ahead of the curve.

BUT GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH BRAINS?

Uh… well, one of the things we champion here at TGBR is brain training. You can strive for excellence by making your own brain excellent. Contribute to the culture!

The Roots of Modern Brain Training through Games

In 2008, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter J. Perrig presented a paper called “Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory” in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”.

Jaeggi et al conducted experiments on fluid intelligence by having subjects play a “dual n-back” game. (FAQ at gwern.net). Players are shown a grid which contains a letter in one square. Then a different letter in a different square is shown. Then a third, and players are asked if this third letter/position is the same as the first. A fourth is shown, and players answer if it is the same as the second. And so on. The challenge is to keep new information in memory while recalling and processing an older memory. The experiment was to see if, as players improve at the game, they would see improvements in their “working memory.”

Subjects were given a preliminary IQ test, and then played the game over spans ranging from 8 to 19 days. A subsequent IQ test showed better results, and those who played the game over 19 days showed more improvement than those who played for only 8.

Subsequent experiments, (including two more led by Jaeggi, with different teams) one led by Qiu Feiyue, and one led by Susanne Schweizer have produced similar results. These results contradict the conventional wisdom that IQ is hardwired and immutable. And while research into these methods for improving intelligence s still relatively new, controversies about improving intelligence are forcing us to reconsider just what the nature of intelligence is.

Authorities such as Michael Merzenich and Robert Plomin have provided additional grist for the controversy mill. Merzenich argues that improving one’s ability at a game merely makes on better at the game itself, and doesn’t necessarily translate to improvements in other areas. Plomin points out that since the idea of intelligence being unchangeable is flawed, science that contradicts this notion is not very remarkable.

But a collection of other studies show that, if nothing else, brain stimulation does result in physical changes in the brain, whatever the current definition of “intelligence” might be. Consider a study done of London Taxi drivers, which found that after intense practice for their licensing exams, (up to four years of practice) these cabbies had enlarged areas of the hippocampus. No one’s giving them Nobel prizes, but no one can deny the intellectual achievement of memorizing 25,000 streets.

And then there’s the Nun Study at the University of Kentucky, which has found a correlation between positive emotions and low incidence of Alzheimer’s. Intriguingly, they even found cases where nuns with physical (post-mortem) evidence of disease did not display any cognitive symptoms during their lives.

Perhaps this is pushing the boundaries of what IQ means, but if a group of women are living, happily, thirty and forty years past the average age of death, I’d call that pretty smart.

New Yorker Calling Brain Training Bunk is Bunk

Hop over to the New Yorker blogs and read up on all kinds of things. The GOP, avant-garde artists, documentaries, hot tech news. Take your pick of categories, all of them smart. Smart blogs written by smart people for smart people. But even smart people get things wrong sometimes.

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.

Simon Says...

Back in 1978, a few programmers put together a simple, but fun toy: red, green, blue, and yellow lights, tones built on an A major chord, and few lines of code. The result was Simon, still available in stores, having gone through several design changes and platform innovations.

But the game remains the same. Simon lights up one colored panel, and the player has to respond by pressing that same panel. Simon lights up that first panel, once more, and then another panel (or sometimes repeats with same one again). The gamer repeats the sequence, and after each iterations Simon adds one more step.

The “basic” game is won after a sequence of eight steps. Due to limitation with hardware and programming, the maximum number of sequences in a single game is 31. The world record for most consecutive games played to 31, in a row, is 14, according the Guinness Book of World Records.

The game is named after the children’s game “Simon Says,” where a leader instructs a group to do various actions, via the phrase “Simons says….”

Simon says touch your nose. Simon says stand on one foot.

Players are “out” if they follow an instruction not prefaced with “Simon says.”

Simon says turn around. Simon says fold your arms. Nod your head. You’re out, Steve, Simon didn’t say to nod your head!

This game, too, had a popularity in the 80s, thanks to Lou Goldstein, a “tumbler” who would lead championship-style Simon Says competitions on TV and sports half-times shows. If you’re old enough, you might remember seeing him on the Dick Clark show, Real People, and Battle of the Network Stars.

Both games, it turns out, are good for you. According to Science Daily, a study published in Psychological Assessment shows “higher academic outcomes associated with the game” in children of ages 3-6 who participated in the study.

Playing the electronic version of Simon can also reap benefits for gamers. A study (PDF) published in the Journal of Behavioral And Neuroscience research in 2006 found that playing Simon served as viable means of measuring working memory, and resisted “habituation, practice effects, and proactive interference across trials.”

Simon says play games to keep your mind sharp!

Smarter than a PC

Quick, which is smarter: your brain, or your laptop?

Trick question. Obviously, your brain is “smarter,” although we could twist around the definition of “smart” to make laptops look like the winner. It’s all about semantics: do we mean intelligent, fast, good at memory, good at recall?

The thing about your brain which beats computers every time, is how adaptable it is. Your brain has been taking in, processing, and storing information almost constantly since before you were born.

How old is your laptop? I few years old? Did you have a different one before that? Why did you get a new one?

Your laptop can be updated a few times, but eventually, technology will leave your old brick behind Your brain, however, is a factory original, and even when its at its slowest, it will still be able to adapt, and change, and learn.

Its called elasticity. And the science has shown that your brain literally changes shape every time you learn. The more you learn, the more your brain changes.

So instead of comparing your brain to your laptop, why not compare it to your muscles? And you know how your muscles change when you exercise.

Forgive me the pun, but I can’t help it: doing cerebral exercises is no-brainer.

Fighting the Zeitgeist

In a Q&A at StackExchange, Jeromy Anglim addresses the question “What exactly is IQ, and how to develop or improve it?” His response offers the following:

“Many quick fixes to boosting intelligence are advertised under the banner such as brain training, however, there is little evidence that they are effective.”

Actually, this does not address the whole true. This was the understanding, years ago, but since then, improvements in testing and analytics have revealed that so-called “brain training” might actually yield positive, long-term results. Studies such as ACTIVE have found that regular mental exercise allows for improvements in memory, reason, and information processing speed-- improvements that can translate into better, more consistent performance in everyday tasks.

In our hypermodern ultra-fast world, it makes sense that people would find  a “quick fix to boost intelligence” appealing. And indeed, there are no brain steroids that are both safe and have a lasting effect. But dedicated body-sculpters will tell you that regular, smart exercise not only yields better results than quick-fixes; they’re healthier and have long-term effects.

You get out of it what you put in. And people are “brain training” all of the time. Whether its a daily crossword or Sudoku, or even reading, studies have shown that such activities can play a part in maintaining mental health into old age.

So, it turns out that playing games and staying “young at heart” can keep you “young at brain” too.

Owning Your Brain Health

Just by reading this, you’ve already taken the first step in improving your mind.

As quoted in a recent Scientific American article, a group of researchers recently found:

“people who have a growth mindset about intelligence (believe that intelligence is malleable) showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence (believe intelligence can’t change).”

The researchers, led by Post-doctoral Fellow Susanne Jaeggi at the University of Maryland, were studying the primary methodological concerns of research in: “fluid intelligence:

the deliberate but flexible control of attention to solve novel “on the spot” problems that cannot be performed by relying exclusively on previously learned habits, schemas, and scripts.

In other words, Thomas the Tank Engine was right. “I think I can” is an important part of healthy brain growth. So I wasn’t being glib, above, when I said you’ve taken your first step. Seeking out information on brain health, doing research, visiting this web site, belies a belief in the ability to improve. And it turns out that such a belief is an essential component to improvement.

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat; it made the cat smarter.