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.

Playing Games Changes Your Brain (for the Better)

In front of you, a green field and blue sky. 

And mushrooms with clown shoes waddling in your direction. You run around them, picking up large gold coins. This is not a dream. This is Super Mario 64. And while you play, your brain is changing.

Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin studied adults playing the popular first-person video game and found remarkable changes in gamers’ cerebellum, right prefrontal cortex, and right hippocampus. These are areas typically associated with executive function, spatial orientation, and memory formation.

We have long known about our brain’s plasticity, the way it literal reshapes itself as we learn. But these findings are particularly intriguing, as they show a direct, causal relationship between playing and brain growth. And according to the research team: “The presented video game training could therefore be used to counteract known risk factors for mental disease such as smaller hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume in, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disease.”

Even more intriguing is an additional data point: gamers who looked forward to playing showed even more change than those who merely played as requested, “evidence suggesting a predictive role of desire in volume change.”

We’ve discussed this sort of thin before, the idea that people have more control over their brain growth that science used to think: in a study (reported on by Scientific American) on permanent changes to working memory: “[Researchers] found that people who have a growth mindset about intelligence… showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence.”

In other words—if you think you can get smarter, and you want to, and you want to have fun doing it, then playing games will definitely help.