Does Brain Training Really Work?

It seems that half the people I talk to about brain training believe that it doesn’t work. My intuition is different, and although I haven’t done a peer-reviewed study, there are good reasons for suspecting that it may have some positive effect. First though, I need to point out what I mean by brain training working.

If people are suddenly expecting to become more intelligent and creative and better at all mental activities, just by playing a puzzle or game, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. This isn’t going to happen (since we don’t have a scientifically accepted definition of intelligence, it wouldn’t be measurable even if it did). I would, however, point out three areas in which you might expect brain training to offer improvements:

1)      General number skills – these are used from day to day for everything from working out which shop gives you the best deal to having some intuition as to which cell phone deal is right for you, or how much tax you owe.

2)      Word and language skills – the ability to recall words and to use them in a particular context, or even to understand and recognise a particular word is vital for communication in the digital era.

3)      Short-term memory skills – such as remembering the items on a to-do list without writing them down, or remembering what to buy without having a shopping list or personal organiser to tell you.

Now with these modest but important goals in mind, here is my list of 5 reasons why brain training ought to work:

You can improve your number skills by doing arithmetic. A big part of working out sums in your head is remembering them. So you don’t need to work out what 7+9 is, because you (hopefully) remember the answer. Clearly any puzzle or game that offers simple number practice is likely to improve your skills in this area. With multiplication, this is particularly important, which is why you learned your times tables in school.

You can improve language skills by playing word games. When you come across a word you don’t know, you tend to look it up. But even if you don’t do this, there is a distinction between so-called active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary means the words you use every day, and passive vocabulary means the words you know the meaning of, but don’t use. The more you see and interact with a particular word, the more likely you are to use ourselves. So you would expect word games to improve your passive vocabulary, if nothing else.

Short term memory skills are to a large extent pre-determined by biology. Very few people, hearing a list of numbers recited quickly, will remember more than about 9 of them (the average is 7). This does not mean that you cannot remember lists of more things that that. The way in which most people do this is to use “tricks”, where the items are associated with something else, or remembered as part of a pattern. Obviously, most tricks which work in a memory game can translate to you remembering a shopping list. Playing a memory game therefore encourages you to get used to methods for remembering things.

You often hear people saying things like “the brain is a muscle”, and while I have no real time for that, it seems intuitively plausible to me that keeping your mind active expands or maintains your cognitive abilities. So you would expect that sufficiently challenging games and puzzles would help to keep you sharp.

Lastly, and most importantly, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the brain can be trained. Most people call this “learning”, and anyone who ever went to school or even learned how to talk or write has experience with this older, more prosaic form of brain training.