Nintendo Keeps Wits and Reflexes Sharp

PreacherTom writes "While not definitively proven, the concept that video games can stave off mental degradation in the elderly is gaining favor. 'Nintendo ... boast[s] that Brain Age was developed with the help of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a respected Japanese neuroscientist whose face pops up at the start of every game. Kawashima believes brains can be kept young and nimble through the rapid repetition of simple mental challenges. The game is wildly popular in Japan, and 4 million copies have been sold worldwide since Brain Age was introduced 15 months ago.'"

Comments

Why is this so surprising???

[WidescreenFreak]

Why is this being treated like it's a new issue? It's been known for years that keeping yourself active mentally keeps your alertness level up. Video games have been the subject of a lot of reports that the continual hand/eye coordination and continual exposure to numerous stimuli, like video, audio, reaction times, puzzle solutions, and so forth, keep the brain active and responsive. There are studies that eldery people who play things like crossword puzzles on a regular basis are generally more alert and have a better mental capacity than others their age who don't engage in such behaviors.

For crying out loud! Even Ronald Reagan thought during his presidency that the continual hand/eye coordination and quick thinking that were necessary with video games were good at keeping kids mentally alert! That fact that this dates back to RR means that this is 20 year old information. (Yeah, yeah, I know that he was a republican and therefore a target for knee-jerk, Slashdot ridicule, but no comments about ketchup or alzhimers, all right?)

Why .. oh why .. is this news to anyone?

Re:Why is this so surprising???

[whereiswaldo]

My thought is that video games are but one way to stay mentally active. They seem to challenge various parts of your brain. If you take the old saying "use it or lose it" and apply it to the various parts of the brain, the more areas of your brain you keep challenged the better. You could think of video games as having "good test coverage" (re: software unit testing). How much test coverage does the game of Chess (strategy) or say a team-based multiplayer game give you? Seems it would be best to do 'cross-training' of your brain to get the best coverage.

It worked for me..

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it. I had brain surgery to remove a minor tumor, it was supposed to be completely safe and undamaging, but the surgery didn't go well and I ended up with a brain injury. I had terrible problems remembering words, and reading was very difficult. What pulled me through was playing Boggle on my computer. I figure the word game helped me reactivate my damaged memory pathways, and retrained me in pattern recognition. I still suck at Boggle, but I always did, even before the surgery. But now I seem to be back to my previous levels of literacy again, and the computer game helped me get there.

Re:It worked for me..

[Tetrad_of_doom]

You may have said this in jest, but there have been studies that suggest that playing video games before surgery can reduce the number of errors that surgeons make. Especially for Laparoscopic surgery, where the surgeon must use a television to see what he is doing.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/

Re:Big Brain Academy

[Jerf]

My wife wanted to get a DS (w00t!) just for Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, which she played at a friends briefly.

She initially liked Brain Age better, as did I, but Big Brain Academy has aged better.

It feels less stupid. Brain Age is true to its goal of trying to keep your brain alert, but many of the challenges only make sense in that context. If you're not in to things where the computer just sits there and watches you do it, like making you draw a picture but being completely unable to grade it, you won't like it as well. In Big Brain Academy everything is actually evaluated.

Also, in Big Brain Academy, while we like some challenges more than others, we pretty much like them all. Leave it to a psychologist to decide to write a test that uses the same parts of the brain as the Stroop test, and actually implements... the Stroop color test directly. Look, when we say games "test reaction time", we don't do it by having every "game" consist of pressing the button as quickly as possible when the light goes on. We have a game where reaction time is smoothly integrated into the rest of the game. Surely we could have done something Stroop-like, without being basically a video-game transcription of a rather dull psychological test.

I don't regret getting Brain Age because some of its tests are valuable. I intend to work with the word list memorization one more, for instance. But I plan on using the cheat code to allow myself to pick it deliberately and skip the Stroop testing.

"In conclusion", while Brain Age had the slicker initial package, Big Brain Academy has much better long-term appeal.

Other games can do it, but this is tuned for this.

[Solr_Flare]

As others have posted, using a variety of games, or even certain non-gaming activities, can give the same benefits as Brain Age. However, after using Brain Age/Big Brain Academy for several months I can safely say the two games are far more effective because they are specifically designed for this purpose. I'm a pretty die hard gamer myself, but after a month of using Brain Age I began to notice a marked improvement in how quickly I could mentally respond to a given task. This wasn't something I just noticed myself, some of my friends and co-workers even commented about how sharper I seemed.

Of the two games, I think most people would enjoy Big Brain Academy more because it feels more like a game, while Brain Age feels more like homework. However, I found Brain Age to be the better of the two simply because its math games are great for people who want to improve their basic math skills.