It is important to maintain a healthy life later in life. There are several ways that can help you achieve this. High spec mobility scooters can make mobility easier and maintain a good social life, exercise plans and healthy diets help your body stay healthy, whilst doing tasks that keep your mind active can promote a healthy mind.
A few years ago ‘brain training’ games were released onto the market and were advertised with the promise that they could slow or reverse the cognitive decline that age can bring. This marketing technique made these types of games very popular, especially amongst the older generations. However scepticism grew around whether these claims were truthful, with two groups of scientists offering different results in 2014.
As the over-65 population rapidly grew, and the average life span increased, there was a desperate need for treatments that help prevent or reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other types of cognitive decline. The promises from these brain training games to improve memory and intellectual capabilities, as well as prevent memory loss, were an attractive offer for consumer’s and consequently a potentially huge business for the companies that released them.
So how could they could promise these results? Our brains can get better at specific tasks if we continue them repeatedly, that’s why if you play a specific game regularly you are bound to see great improvements in your skills since you first started. However what makes these brain training games different, according to the companies, is the transferable skills learnt from the tasks involved in the game into real life.
A new study, by the Department of Psychology for the University of Illinois, has now tried to bring an answer to this debate. The meta-analysis consisted of reviews of over 130 papers into the subject. However only a handful of studies have actually tried to give comprehensive answers on whether these types of games can impact real-life performance.
These studies focused on the brain’s ability to form new neural connections but have assumed this would mean that this would influence the real-life abilities. For over a century scientists have been studying human’s ability to transfer skills we’ve learnt from one situation and apply it to others, with differing results. What makes this area of study difficult is the fundamental differences between types of knowledge, with certain knowledge being specific to one task and others being transferable to many scenarios.
The game Luminosity, from the company Lumor Labs, was fined $2 million dollars earlier this year due to false advertising. Advertising rules clearly state that a product is not allowed to claim it is an effective medical treatment unless there is sufficient data to prove it.
The scientists that conducted the study conclude: “ Nevertheless, we know of no evidence for broad-based improvement in cognition, academic achievement, professional performance, and/or social competencies that derives from decontextualized practice of cognitive skills devoid of domain-specific content. Rather, the development of such capacities appears to require sustained investment in relatively complex environments that afford opportunities for consistent practice and engagement with domain-related challenges…
Brain-training programs typically train performance on relatively simple skills in a limited range of contexts (typically on a home computer and with little involvement of substantive content or knowledge), but their marketing materials imply generalization to a wide range of skills in varied contexts with varied content.”
You can read the full paper that consists of 50,000 words. The paper highlights that there are still a lot of questions around whether cognitive training can really prevent the problems of old age, but so far the results from available literature shows that brain training games only really make you good at performing the tasks involved in the game and not the answer we had all been hoping for.
The search for a viable treatment for cognitive decline continues.