Is Brain Training Effective For Improving Your Memory?

It is true that brain training games are good fun and when you play them frequently you can definitely improve considerably at playing them. You may well imagine that by playing them, you are taking steps for improving memory and for enhancing all your other brain abilities. It is justifiable to make this assumption, yet how do we know for sure that there has truly been an improvement? Do we have scientifically-proven evidence of the effectiveness of these mental exercises?

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 took on 13000 adult volunteers to take part in their rigorous experiment over a period of six weeks. The purpose was to see whether training the brain on several tasks developed to utilize different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would develop brain faculties, such as memory and problem-solving capabilities.

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.

The intention of the study was to observe if becoming competent at brain training tasks would bring about improvement in the same skills when employed in a different context. So both groups of test subjects were tested prior to and after the experiment in their capacity to accomplish tasks such as problem-solving and reproducing strings of numbers.

Upon retesting at the end of the trial, the control group's score had improved by 4.35 per cent. Surprisingly however, the score for the experimental group was almost identical. It represented only a 6.52 per cent increase over its original score. So, statistically there was no difference between the two groups. Of course, what they could not conclude was whether the small improvement was just the effect of working online. Perhaps there could have been another group that did nothing online.

So if you have been playing these brain training games with the intention of improving your memory, is it time to give them up and put them out to pasture? Well, that is entirely up to you, but do bear in mind that studies, no matter what their size, can be flawed and that what does not work for some people could work for you. If you really care about improving memory , then there are many other memory strategies you can explore, such as playing sports, taking a look at improving your diet and even going to the odd concert.