The billion-dollar brain training industry would have you believe that playing brain games on your computer or mobile device will help boost your mental functioning, but the scientific research on the matter tells a different story. Today I will share with you my story as a young graduate student trying to unlock the power of brain games and the science that demonstrates the limitations of brain games. The truth is that brain games help you get better at the game, but they do not help you to improve mental functioning overall. Brain games can be played for fun, but there is little evidence to suggest that they will boost your brain capacity. Not to worry, researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out what actions you can take that will help you boost your mental functions – you just won’t find them in the app store. The evidence suggests that we need to step away from training discrete cognitive abilities using computerized programs and apps and continue to engage in the complexity that exists in our everyday worlds – learning new things and challenging our minds.

Dr. Andrea’s Background:

Dr. Andrea Wilkinson started studying aging when she was getting her Bachelor of Arts degree in the early 2000s. As part of her education, she did some volunteer work in long-term care homes, and spent a lot of time talking to and engaging with people who had mid to late stage dementia (symptoms include memory loss, disorientation to time and space, communication challenges). From this volunteer work as a BA student, Dr. Andrea gained a lot of first-hand experience  working with people who had undergone a substantial amount of brain changes (dementia is a neurogenerative brain disorder),  as a result, she became fascinated with the idea of brain training as a way to maintain or even enhance mental abilities.

 So, when Dr. Andrea started graduate school in 2007, she was keen to explore the use of brain games as a way to maintain or enhance our mental functions.

At the time, computerized games were all the rage and Dr. Andrea was convinced that she would be able to design and develop computerized brain games that would actually lead to improvements in mental abilities – like memory, thinking speed and reasoning in healthy older adults. Both of Dr. Andrea’s Master’s thesis and her PhD dissertation were focused on brain training using computerized programs in the lab.

Fast forward 6-years.

Dr. Andrea was extremely sad to discover that doing certain brain exercises on the computer led to improvement in those activities – but, it didn’t extend beyond the games you were playing. So, in other words, playing computerized brain games helped you get better at the game you are playing, but they aren’t very helpful in benefitting mental abilities overall.

 Why were brain games even considered a possible avenue for improving mental abilities?

Brain Plasticity and Brain Games

Brain plasticity is your brain’s ability to change in response to your experiences and environment. It was this understanding of brain plasticity that gave rise to the notion of brain games. If computerized programs and brain games are designed to tap into various mental functions (and help us exercise our memory, thinking speed, ignoring distractions, reasoning – whatever it may be...), the concept of brain plasticity would lead you to believe that the experience of playing brain games will impact how your brain functions. This belief created a billion-dollar brain gaming industry.

Although the promise of brain games was – at one point – very positive, the body of research continues to suggest that there are limitations to how much brain games can change your mental functions.

Brain Games Debunked

There is a large body of research which supports the limitations of brain games in improving mental functions, but this podcast episode will specifically outline and discuss Dr. Andrea’s research (Master’s and PhD) as supporting evidence.

Dr. Andrea’s Brain Training Research

In Dr. Andrea’s Master’s (MA) research, she trained people to “ignore irrelevant material” using a computerized task. The reason she specifically chose mental ability is because our ability to ignore distraction is important to our everyday life (e.g., blocking out surrounding conversations while trying to read the newspaper at a coffee shop or withholding the urge to check e-mails when trying to write a paper). Furthermore, increasing age is associated with greater difficulty filtering out distraction. This is likely because “ignoring distraction” is controlled by the frontal lobe of the brain – an area of the brain that is particularly vulnerable to aging (click here for more about this published work).  So, in Dr. Andrea’s MA thesis research, she trained the ability to ignore irrelevant information using a computerized task called the Stroop task. In this task, participants are asked to name the ink colour of a colour word that is shown on the screen. Specifically, if a research participant sees the word RED (R-E-D) in red ink, the correct response is “red”. Alternatively, if they see the word RED (R-E-D) in blue ink, the correct answer is “blue”. This task is a lot more difficult to do than it sounds. This is because the human brain is hardwired to read words; so, when the word RED (R-E-D) appears in blue ink, our automatic inclination is to read the word and incorrectly respond “red” (instead of “blue”).

Dr. Andrea’s MA research found that healthy older adults (age 60+) showed meaningful improvements in their ability to ignore distraction across six training sessions (3x/week for two consecutive weeks). In other words, the research showed that – with practice – older adults got better at ignoring irrelevant information. We even found that these benefits lasted for up to three years later!  

BUT, and this is a big BUT, Dr. Andrea did not see any additional outside benefits. People got better at naming colours (Stroop task), but they didn’t get better at anything else that was tested (e.g., thinking speed or paying attention). It is believed that the main goal of training mental abilities is to see benefits beyond the practiced tasks (or the brain game that you are playing). Overall, mental abilities are trained because we want to see improvements in a bunch of skills (in a variety of different mental abilities) – not just the task that people are trained in (or not just in the brain game that you are playing). But, Dr. Andrea’s MA research did not support this. In fact, a lot of research that was coming out at the time (so this is around 2009) was also showing the limits of brain games. Specifically, conclusions were being drawn that demonstrated that brain games led to improvements in the specific game, but did not lead to improvements in other unrelated abilities.

As you can imagine, getting better at ignoring colour WORDS to correctly identify the INK colour (as  shown in Dr. Andrea’s MA work) is not applicable in the real world. This ability to ignore distraction as measured by the STROOP task is kind of meaningless outside of the lab.

As a young graduate student, however, Dr. Andrea was not convinced. As she went on to complete her PhD, her belief was that she needed to find the right combination of brain games to unlock the “safe” of brain health and wellness. As a good doctoral student, she crafted a clever experiment to investigate whether she could crack the “brain game” code.

In her PhD research, Dr. Andrea again trained “ignoring distraction”; but, this time she used a variety of different tasks. She thought that by using a special mix of computerized brain exercise programs she would be able to yield broader benefits than she saw previously – in her MA work. But, the end results were almost the same as what she found in her MA work: healthy older adults get better at all of the tasks used during the training, but the benefits did not extend to other mental abilities (e.g., memory performance and thinking speed). The evidence was clear – brain games target very specific mental abilities and it is only those very discrete abilities that improve.

General Research Findings

The limitation of brain games has been shown again and again in the research. Of course, there are a small number of studies that demonstrate the generalizability of very specially designed brain games (e.g., brain games that adapt to an individual’s performance and get increasingly more difficulty the better it is played) – but, a large body of evidence on brain games and computerized programs continuously show their limitations.

Some of the current research on brain training suggests that ideal approaches to improving or maintaining mental functions should utilize a more innovative approach by targeting changes in thinking patterns using real-world materials, rather than what has been done in the past (e.g., targeting specific and discrete mental abilities through practice on lab-based computerized tasks).

Some other research that  will be briefly cited here, includes an article called “Do Brain-Training Programs work” published in 2016 by Simons and colleagues states, and I quote, “Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”

From Dr. Andrea’s perspective, the sole purpose of brain games and training is to improve a wide variety of mental functions that are used in everyday life. But, traditional brain games do not help in this pursuit – brain games only help us to get better at the specific games we are playing – little else.

 But, all is not lost.

As a true believer in brain health and wellness, after completing her PhD, Dr. Andrea dove deep into the research literature to explore what unique features of “brain training” approaches  do lead to improvements beyond the training task. Looking back now, it seems so obvious; but, the biggest benefits of “brain training” comes from continuously submerging yourself in mentally complex and challenging environments and situations.

The Alternative to Brain Games

The Synapse Project (led by Dr. Denise C. Park) systematically showed the benefits of remaining in a state of sustained mental challenge and continuously seeking to acquire new information (active engagement), as compared to inactive observations of familiar material and existing knowledge (passive engagement).

• The active engagement group completed a professionally taught photography and/or quilting course. In the photography group, participants were trained how to use a camera and computer software programs for photo editing. In the quilting group, participants first learned basic quilting skills and then progressed to complete complex individual projects using a computerized sewing machine. Some participants completed a combination of these two courses.

•  The passive engagement group engaged in activities (e.g., cooking, playing games, and going on regular field trips organized around a different topic, such as travel or history) that required no formal acquisition of novel information or they individually performed a structured set of activities that relied on existing knowledge, such as crossword puzzles or viewing documentaries.

 The authors found that those in the active engagement groups showed a meaningful improvement in memory (after completing their assigned photography and/or quilting course) in comparison to the passive engagement group. When the authors looked at each group separately, they found evidence that those that learned photography alone or in combination with quilting showed the greatest improvements in memory relative to those who performed individualized activities that relied on existing knowledge, such as crossword puzzles or viewing documentaries. In other words, these authors found that sustained effort to acquire a demanding new skill improved memory.

Conclusions

The take-home message is clear: SEEK OUT ACTIVITIES THAT ARE BOTH NOVEL AND MENTALLY CHALLENGING!

Just like you exercise your bodies physically, you need to exercise your brains with mental challenges. Training specific mental abilities (e.g., thinking speed, memory, ignoring distraction) is not as promising as training global, complex, and novel skills.

You need to push yourself to explore new and exciting avenues that challenge and expand your minds. There needs to be a shift away from exercising specific mental abilities (e.g., by using online or mobile brain games) and, alternatively, a movement towards training overall general skills.

If you engage in the complexity that is life, the discrete abilities (e.g., thinking speed, memory) will benefit too.

What makes YOUR brain sweat? That’s where you want to be. But, it is important to remember that what constitutes a mental challenge is different for everyone. There is no finite list of engaging activities to do. What I need for a mental challenge is different from what you need. The possibilities are endless. You have to think about what you are interested in and what challenges you (based on your past experiences and skill sets). The key is to keep pushing yourself – once you master a new skill, how can you make it a bit more mentally demanding? Push yourself outside of your comfort zone, and continue to challenge yourself!

Collectively, we need to step away from training discrete cognitive abilities using brain games, computerized programs and apps and think about ways to continuously push ourselves outside of our comfort zone and into an active learning state. It is Dr. Andrea’s belief that true mental challenges happen in the real world – not in the app store.