Discoveries Of Research For Improving Memory By Using Mental Training Games
If you are searching for ways to improve your memory, an obvious and rather satisfying possibility is to participate in brain training games. These are created not only to help with improving memory, but also to boost your other mental abilities, such as problem-solving. When you play, you certainly get speedier and more accurate and get improved results in the games. The question that is not often asked is whether or not these game-playing abilities are consequently relevant to other areas of your daily 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.
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.
They intended to find out whether playing a range of computer-based games, including memory exercises, over a six week time period, each created to exercise different areas of the brain, would cause people in the study to be better able to utilize their brain abilities in other areas not related to playing brain training games. The experiment involved a good cross-section of 13000 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 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 intention of the study was to observe whether getting experienced at brain training tasks would lead to improvement in the same abilities when utilized in a different circumstance. So both groups of test subjects were tested prior to and following the experiment in their capacity to carry out tasks such as problem-solving and remembering number sequences.
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.
