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Brain Training Games Don't Train Your Brain
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq.co.uk: "A new study has shown that brain training games do little to exercise the grey matter. Millions of people who have been prodding away at their Nintendo DS portable consoles, smug in the knowledge that they are giving their brains a proper work-out, might have to rethink how they are going to stop the contents of their skulls turning into mush."
No more brain training. It's back to killing it slowly with beer for me.
It's one thing to ask whether these tests make you "smarter". But even the story says they improve speeds in taking the brain tests. I also notice that the control group didn't just sit there doing nothing, they used the Internet, which may have "exercised the brain" in some fashion, assuming they weren't reading /.
Also, there does seem to be evidence that mental activity can ward off Alzheimer's and "Research has also found that cognitive leisure activities reduce the risk of cognitive decline."
Maybe it doesn't serve a practical purpose for some people, but it seems among the elderly at least there may be some benefit (?)
Of course Brain training, Wii Fit etc. don't work. They're the video game equivalent of ab trainers - designed to appeal to lazy stupid people who think they can acquire a genius mind or a godlike physique by buying Nintendo's latest gimmick.
Please don't say I can no longer justify my Sudoku addiction!
You can't stop your brain from slowly turning to mush. You may as well enjoy the ride.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
I have been using brain training games for about 10 years now, and now I'm able to type 15wpm.
You can enjoy your capacities for focus and abstract thought well into old age if you make regular use of your brain.
You don't need any fancy computer program to do it though. Just make it a habit to engage whatever cognitive functions you most want to retain, and you will retain them much longer than any of your peers who do not make a similar effort.
Are these games advertised as having some benefit to your intelligence / memory / cognition / etc? Or is there some disclaimer somewhere saying that they might actually do nothing of the sort?
Just wondering if consumers might have a right to claim their money back if the products have been falsely advertised.
Practicing any skill requiring cognitive functions technically trains your brain.
The question is, what are the effects that people who play these kinds of games are hoping for?
.: Max Romantschuk
Brain Workshop is a Dual N-Back game which may actually improve your brain.
The article says, in essence, that the study found that using Brain Academy type software for six weeks did not improve cognitive function. However, nowhere does the study prove, as the article alleges, that use of such software could not slow the rate of cognitive decay. These are two entirely different things - the second one would require a long-term study tracking both users and non-users over, say, 20 or 30 years.
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
Exercise.
Anything that increases profusion of blood to your brain is a good thing. The brain is just another organ that will respond favorably to being fit. And the repetitive aerobic activities like running and biking lead to a meditative state that can help your reasoning at a high level as well.
I think the brain games can help memory and response time, but only after you get your exercise.
I've always found that the "brain training" games are like memorizing multiplication tables, whereas true learning is like understanding that multiplication is a form of addition. Once I know how to learn, I can figure out whatever I need to. Once I learned that multiplication is a form of addition, I could multiply just about any number without having to memorize tables. I'd rather have understanding, which is slower but more robust and flexible, than memorization, which is faster but limited to the details that are memorized.
...that your brain mostly benefited from doing different and new things. Trying new experiences, foods, languages, even things as simple as taking different routes to work and back create new paths in the brain which lead to quicker thinking and better recollection.
But if you take one new thing (a video game puzzle) and do the shit out of it, the value is rapidly lost.
At least that's how I've had it explained.
THL phish sticks
From TFA: "...while you are noisily 'playing' with some worthless game where large-breasted ladies in not much clothing chop up mutant dinosaurs with giant chain saws" Where can I get this game?
FTFA:
"...while you are noisily 'playing' with some worthless game where large-breasted ladies in not much clothing chop up mutant dinosaurs with giant chain saws..."
Maybe I'm living under a rock, but what specific game are they describing here, if any? I am intrigued by its ideas and would like to subscribe to its newsletter.
I agree with Will Wright...playing something like Advance Wars is a great way to exercise the brain, especially to get it jumpstarted in the morning.
I personally prefer to play a few songs on Guitar Hero or play 20-30 minutes of Muramasa: The Demon Blade while on my recumbent bike. My mornings are always much easier and I'm much more awake when I give myself the time to do that.
Living With a Nerd
Anyone that thinks you'll go from a tard to a genius will be disappointed. However, practising anything improves you ability at that particular thing. Take normal video games and put a newbie in front of Contra and then stick in someone who has been playing it for years. There will be a huge difference. Some people see bigger gains than others. For instance if I continue playing Mega man games I do get better but I'll never master them. That and I don't think we should complain too much about something that helps people take interest in things like math over wasting their morning reading the Daily Mail, Sun or something equally brain damaging.
So TV doesn't in fact rot your brain?
We know from this ten-year-old study that playing bridge boosts your immune system, so clearly some forms of mental exercise have some forms of positive effects. Perhaps a better alternative to Brain Training would be playing bridge on your mobile device.
Turns out he's not actually a professor at all!
Well, short term studies tend to be more tractable in academia due to limited funding. But I don't really find the results all that surprising. The brain games don't really challenge deeper cognitive functions but try to simply train your physical memory to react better to rudimentary problems. Jotting down 6 x 7 really fast isn't likely to expand your mind. If you really wanted to sharpen your brain, you'd study something like physics, philosophy, or music in greater depth. Those and other subjects use rudimentary skills in a broader sense to build more complex models, which improve your understanding of the world.
GNC and other stores have shelves and shelves of vitamins and herb extracts that don't actually improve your health. Frosted Flakes gets sold with health claims. Basically, the use of a spurious claim about improving mental acuity or health in advertising is so common that it's generally best to ignore those claims entirely, unless they're coming from your doctor.
The people who stay sharp into their old age are people who are still actively using their brains and bodies as much as possible. For instance, Justice John Paul Stevens has a ridiculously good tennis game for someone in his late 80's, as well as continuing to work on legal cases, and may become a case study for gerontologists. Now, what's causing what (behavior->health or health->behavior) is a different question.
I am officially gone from
Brain Age largely consists of extremely simple arithmetic problems that people already deal with on a daily basis. What if you test people on more difficult problems? A relatively large number of people learn trigonometry and calculus compared to the number of people who require it on a daily basis, would you see an improvement among this group if you begin asking them for derivatives and antiderivatives?
What really caught me was they said that doing the training sped up your ability to do things you trained on (duh). NPR gave the example of a baggage scanner where the number of bags going in and out changes, you you have to keep track of the number of bags in the machine at any given moment.
So that may not be useful to your everyday life, and games that are similar aren't supposed to benefit. But what about the games you do in real life? As I remember, the first two Brain Training games Nintendo put out had many real world things like simple math problems (6 + 3, 7 * 5), reading analog clocks, and making change. These are all things people do in real life. Maybe doing tons of elementary math problems won't make you smarter, but it will make you faster and more confident when you have to do simple math, and that's a plus.
Count the number of spinning yellow number 7s in this jumble may not be that applicable to real life, but some are.
Nintendo never advertised the games would make you smarter. They framed it as "keeping your brain fit", like you keep your muscles fit by using them. There have been tons of copy-cats since Brain Training sold so well, and it wouldn't surprise me they claimed (or hinted) they would make you smarter. But doing simple math problems can't make you smarter, only better at simple math problems.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Plus some kinds of activity seem to indeed increase performance of your brain...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back
http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
One that hath name thou can not otter
Nothing like a good old-fashioned crossword puzzle to exercise the brain. Also, no pencil and eraser allowed. Pen only.
Actually, n-back HAS been proven to train your brain. It's available as a game on the iphone - "IQ booster" It's hard and fun. There's a free version online and some studies on it.
What I find interesting is that you're questioning this study's negative assertion, when you should be challenging those who make positive assertions about the value of these games to show you a study confirming as much.
"Well you've shown that the game doesn't do X, but I feel that it might provide some other benefit" doesn't mean anything unless it's backed up with a study that shows that the game provides that other benefit.
"some worthless game where large-breasted ladies in not much clothing chop up mutant dinosaurs with giant chain saws" I want this game.
~NoX
"Well you've shown that the game doesn't do X, but I feel that it might provide some other benefit" doesn't mean anything unless it's backed up with a study that shows that the game provides that other benefit.
Which is why in the second half of their post, which you appear to not have reached before making your interesting post, they provided links. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
That's cool.
One bother though... if you try the NATO Phonetic mode, the speaker has a very heavy Asian accent.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I like Palladium's explanation of mental abilities: Mental Infinity (MI), Mental Agility (MA), and Mental Endurance (ME).
The training games are mostly improving your MA. The games are typically to short to directly affect your ME but having to replay the same mini-games for 6 weeks in a row might give some ME benefit. The games are not complex enough to affect your MI after the first few times. The tests from the article sound to focus on MI, then MA and maybe ME. This would explain the results of no benefit besides the smug feeling.
For gods sake... A six weeks experiment? This is bullshit!
Did that research find that such activities reduce cognitive decline, or that people who engage in such activities tend to have less cognitive decline? The latter doesn't tell use whether it's the activities that reduce decline, or something else which is both the cause of less decline and people doing activities. I hate it when studies that find correlations between X and Y are reported as finding that X causes Y (or Y causes X, depending on who is making up these causation relations).
Not all games are the same, and this study's participants were using certain popular console products. I don't think this research result surprises anyone, and it's not applicable to the brain game genre. It's been mentioned, but the N-back is backed by some research. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back) There are games for it, and they're nothing like the brain games in this study. I'm a brain game developer, and I've made some different games using the same memory principle of the N-back at http://workingmemoryworkout.blogspot.com/ Consumers really have to trust their own judgement, because as far as I know there's no good consumer reports for brain games. For anyone in need of a great brain game resource, see http://www.ludism.org/mentat/BrainTrainingGames.
At the risk of being modded down (and the certain doom of being mocked), I feel compelled to follow up on this and feed the troll. I went the UoP route, and found out that many (perhaps most) of their online degree programs were little more than diploma mills at the time. And at that point I entered a rather profound depression because I realized I'd been a fool and had probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars (yes, smart people do get suckered too).
However, it wasn't until later that I discovered that I might have actually lucked out. I got my Masters in Education - Curriculum & Instruction, which actually happens to be a very strong program in its own right, because of the sheer number of professional educators who take the UoP's Education grad-level courses, and teach them. All but two of my professors were educators, education professionals, or senior education management (the two that weren't - well, I considered asking for their photos to print out on my toilet paper so I could wipe my ass with their face - they were THAT bad). Not only that, but I learned a hell of a lot about education - the philosophy, the psychology, the pedagogy, and about how school districts operate when it comes to curriculum and teaching. And I was able to take all that information and apply it to my corporate world quite successfully. Which shocked the hell out of me because I initially thought my degree was worthless.
If I must be flamed for saying I have a MAED from University of Phoenix, then flame me. I was taken in, as were many other people. But, surprisingly, I emerged with an actual graduate-level education in Education that was worth the hassle (which impressed my wife, who's a teacher herself), and has proved itself. I don't know now if UoP cleaned up their act. I suspect they have as they haven't lost their accreditation, the DoL hasn't found any new complaints, and now everyone and their uncle is getting in on the online education program.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Protect da Wii, son!
Or we could just let which company has the best marketing team decide which products we use for this sort of thing... that'll get good results. Not.
Someone had to do it.
At first, I thought this was a study of those biofeedback games. Those are pretty damn cool.
And, since you learn to vary your heartbeat patterns and galvanic skin response levels, I'd say that would be training your brain to control your body.
Anyway. Not too offtopic!
Regards.
Actually, I did get to the links before making my interesting point. And indeed your comment suggests that while you "got to them" in the sense of seeing they were there, you didn't click on them.
From the first link:
"The study finds that older people who regularly read, play cards and solve crossword puzzles can cut their risk of developing dementia by more than 60 percent."
A study about reading, cards, and crosswords doesn't tell us anything about these games.
The second link is about the effect of physical exercise on congitive decline.
Maybe this "brain training" is just a way to season your brain. It will make you a target during the zombie invasion, instead of the less tasty authors of these games.
You don't need to be faster than a man eating tiger, you just need to be faster than the next guy.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"Also, there does seem to be evidence that mental activity can ward off Alzheimer's [npr.org] and "Research has also found that cognitive leisure activities reduce the risk of cognitive decline. [nyu.edu]"
But I would say that the study shows that the "brain training" games do not create much mental activity.
I played one once, it was basically just a bunch of stupid mini games.
I would bet most normal games would induce more brain activity then "brain trainers".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Abstract
Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.
A card version of the memory task used in their research is available at: http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?DouglasReay/SnapBackGameRules
The Nintendo DS was released in 2004. You want a 20 or 30 year study?!?
I have Brain Age and I always felt like Sudoku was more stimulating than the core game. Although the math game, where I had to do basic computations as quickly as possible did have practical applications. I found myself doing basic math more quickly and relying on the calculator less.
But otherwise, it was relatively easy to peak at the games and sustain that level if I was playing on a regular basis. It's really no different than playing any other game except that Brain Age offered even less room for improvement. The overall package was rather obnoxious, with that professor getting in the way of me just getting to what I wanted to do. And the algorithm for gauging progress seemed rather simplistic.
Ten minutes a day, three times a day, for six weeks? So basically they're saying that three hours of playing the game, spread out over a month and a half, wasn't enough to produce a measurable improvement in overall brain function? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
I'm not saying these games really do work, but I'd hardly call this sufficient evidence to conclude they don't work either.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
hey, it should at least improve you arithmetic skills, shouldn't it?
The test group should not have been playing on the internet, they should have been vegitating in front of reality-tv. Those brain training games are not about stimulating an active mind but a stagnant one. It is for people who do nothing else that requires any thinking at all. Like slashdot editors...
It is the same as taking the stairs, that is not going to make an olympic gymnast any fitter, but for a cubible dweller, it can make a difference when it is the only excersise in the day.
Almost any gamer will not need these games, they are already playing. Brain games are for people who don't do anything else with their brain.
Tomorrow: Nintendogs not good for people with a real dog.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It may be bullshit, and I agree the test wasn't long enough to come to a valid conclusion, a few things are true.
1) Profit. Sorry, I know that's not the typical Slashdot order, but someone got paid to do the study.
2) The obvious conclusion was given. Playing games, no matter how educational, don't make you smarter. At most, they will further your education.
3) Anyone can do a study and get publicity from the BBC and Slashdot. :)
I do believe that they already knew (or hypothesized) the conclusion, and applied it to their improperly scaled experiment.
I use the same technique to prove that I'm immortal. On the day I was born, I didn't die. Every day after that, I failed to die. In over 13,000 days, I haven't died. There's been a 0:13000 chance that I'll end up dead. Therefore it can be determined that I won't ever die. The same applies to me being abducted by aliens, warping time and space with my mind, and finding a hole in the ground that leads to a hidden civilization in middle earth. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
But doing simple math problems can't make you smarter, only better at simple math problems.
Given the current standards of education, doing simple math will soon count as smart.
A study about reading, cards, and crosswords doesn't tell us anything about these games.
Sure it does.
The second link is about the effect of physical exercise on congitive decline.
Keep reading. ;)
The enemies of Democracy are
If such a study is required in order to verify or debunk the results the article claims to already have, yes. That's what science is, journalism be damned.
So have it on my desk by Monday, OK?
who the hell funds these studies, this is like the g-spot study, the runner's high studies and sugar high... If any of my money went to these studies I'd ask for a refund, seriously, how far from the track can they get,
Less is more! Over at the jalop site someone asked "why do they insist on cover the engine when you already have a hood?"
If they wanted us to be able to do things for our selves, they wouldn't do that. Someone else asked "if the service for that vehicle is dealer only." Same thing with education right? Simple math means fewer people can handle more complicated jobs?
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
I had a brain training "app" on an old nokia of mine and it vastly improved my ability to tally up a list of numbers. That's the only real world improvement I observed. However I did get quite good at those tests.
Jeff: They revoked my lawyer licence over some qualifications
Duncan: I thought you had a bachelor's from Columbia?
Jeff: Yes, and now I need to get one from America
I thought it was more like german... but very thick indeed!
and don't forget your pet hamster. it can get a diploma too.
Nintendo has combined the electronics of the game to interact with the brain's instructions to the body, consequently stimulating cognitive function and general cardiovascular regeneration.
But (if we say that the universe has been around for 14 billion years) you've only been alive for 13,000 of 5,110,000,000,000 possible days; or 5,109,999,987,000 dead days against 13,000 live days.
So, although you've had a good sequential run, you are more likely dead.
Those aren't 5,109,999,987,000 dead days, they're days in a pre-corporeal state. Since entering a human state, the human form has remained.
But if you consider that our corporeal state is only one state of being, rather than having a finite beginning or end, then that brings it to 1 in 393076923 of being bound in a corporeal state tomorrow. Well, unless you believe in movement between states, such as reincarnation, then the numbers may be drastically different.
Ahh, those pesky belief systems.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
FWIW there's an ebook version of a paperback that teaches the following, and a helluva lot more.
How to do simple math left-to-right, like English; the diametric of the method we're taught in school.
As an example, any 2-digit number times 11.
95 x 11
Add the two numbers that multiply against 11. In this case 9 + 5 is 14.
Carry the one over the ten's position. 1+9 =10.
The number in the sum's one's position, in this case a 4, goes between the parent's numbers, in this case between 9 and 5.
1, 0, 4, 5
This scales up (968 x 11), but with slightly different methodology. Practice == the ability to do simple math much faster.
Nobody would dispute the value of exercise, which we know through experience and observation over thousands of years. But congratulations nonetheless :)
I've got some other revelations for you.
That thing about the birds and the bees, not true. Also the tooth fairy...
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The article says Nintendo does not make any claims that Brain Training or More Brain Training are scientifically proven to improve cognitive function.
I saw the commercial, and it waggled its eyebrows suggestively and gestured furtively while mouthing 'look over there'
Newton's third law of medical research: For every finding, there's at least one equal and opposite finding.
"The obvious conclusion was given. Playing games, no matter how educational, don't make you smarter. At most, they will further your education."
Now that's what I dispute. I do not beleive that 6 weeks of ANYTHING (games, education, reading, etc...) will change your cognitive abilities.
Braaaaaaaaains!
I agree this study is very misguided. It seems as though they're looking in all the wrong places. I think it depends entirely on the type of game that you are playing, as I'm sure that not every brain game is the same. It's been proven that specific activities improve entire areas of intelligence rather than just your skill at that activity. On this page it talks about the improvement in children's math scores after making a chess a required part of the school curriculum: http://brainyyouth.com/2010/01/16/the-power--fun-of-chess-from-an-early-age.aspx . The study is not on that page but I believe there are links to it from there. Children in Quebec had the lowest math scores in Canada, the province introduced chess as an attempt to improve them, and suddenly, what do you know, they're at the top of the country in math scores. So clearly specific tasks and less generally, games, CAN improve someone's intellect. I would offer the idea that chess is not math, and therefore chess improving your math skills would have to be considered an improvement in the area of intellect which is responsible for our math skills.
I would also put forth that many video games teach strategy in a way that's beneficial to your brain development, in fact that's also been shown in many studies involving people with damage to specific areas of the brain, think that one was posted on slashdot.
I believe intelligence is largely based on being interested in something worthwhile and developing your brain for that subject. It's been proven doing iq tests improves your scores on iq tests, so clearly iq is subjective. In addition most of the great inventors have been called eccentric at best and crazy at worst. They became obsessed with particular subjects and spent so much time with them that they could easily shift their visualizations and understandings of components of the subjects to form new ideas or solve problems remaining in them. Like music, a beginner with music may find it hard to write coherent songs. Someone who has spent years with it may shift through their knowledge to come up with creative or interesting music much more easily. Obsession seems to drive novel creation and thought, and one could argue that we've mostly measured intellectual worth in that way for centuries.
I would say even that an overall higher iq could be a side effect of specializing our brains in such a way to solve the less tractable problems of any particular field. Obtaining highly specialized knowledge and ways of thinking in a certain area is bound to get you pegged as genius, even supposing if your general knowledge is deficit. So in the end, I say certain "brain games" may not stimulate intellectual growth much. However, games that stimulate your brain, like chess, will. A more useful study may have involved comparing the things that have been proven to make people smarter(i.e. chess, learning a musical instrument, learning a different language, etc, etc, etc, things that teach you new ways to think and let your brain work by developing specialized knowledge and neural connections to take advantage of such knowledge). Testing both those interested in the subject and those not interested in it, for each subject, to see which has the most generally high gains might provide interesting results.
My guess is they didn't account for environmental factors like the logic-destroying effect of polarized politics.