DailyDirt: Playing Games With Your Brain
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Who wouldn’t want to improve their brain function simply by playing some games or doing some brain training exercises? (If doing homework or reading counts as a brain training exercise, though, there are plenty of students who don’t seem to want to better their brains.) Brain games are getting popular (have you seen any Lumosity ads recently?), and there are already plenty of educational software programs for skills like learning foreign languages. Some of these brain games claim to help you maintain your cognitive skills as you get older, and there’s even some evidence that these claims could be true. Here are just a few examples of brain games that could help keep us all mentally fit for decades to come.
- A 10-year long study of older adults shows that certain kinds of brain training exercises can have long-lasting, measurable (and beneficial) effects. Hundreds of volunteers (2,832) were divided into four groups for a control group and groups receiving memory, reasoning, and speed-of-processing training — and the groups with reasoning and speed training showed significantly less decline in those cognitive skills. Unfortunately, it looks like memory training doesn’t slow memory loss as we age…. [url]
- People over 60 might want to consider playing some brain training video games for a few weeks. Researchers created a (kinda lame) video game called NeuroRacer, and elderly volunteers who played it showed improvements in memory, attention and multi-tasking abilities. [url]
- Brain training video games are a multi-million-dollar industry, but the actual benefits of commercial brain games have yet to be rigorously studied — or if they’ve been studied, the games show little to no real benefits. Hopefully, game makers will eventually succeed in making games that match their brain-boosting claims. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: brain, cognitive abilities, education, elderly, games, memory, multitasking, neuroracer, retirement, training, video games
Companies: lumosity
Comments on “DailyDirt: Playing Games With Your Brain”
Each of these bullet points seem to contridict the one(s) before it:
“Unfortunately, it looks like memory training doesn’t slow memory loss as we age.”
“…elderly volunteers who played it showed improvements in memory…”
“…the games show little to no real benefits.”
Admittedly, I did not RTFAs, but just from the synopsis’ it makes me scratch my head.
Re: Re:
an obvious sign you need these brain exercises…
hhh
Re: Re: Re:
Haters hate harder?
I’d suggest Snowden’s Leaks: The Game
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/620265
Where are the open source
versions of these “games”?
Given the buying and selling of one’s “status” by various Corporations to whomever – why should anyone trust anything but open source versions so you can control them yourself?
The best form of cerebral exercise is chess and the best form of chess for maximum exertion is faery chess (variable rules, agreed between players before each game).
But chess is not patentable so large Corporations have no interest in it.
The following nootropic drugs profoundly improve the functioning of the brain and taken together have synergistic effects:-
Hydergine
Piracetam
Lucidril (DMAE)
“Mind” is an Ancient Greek myth and is entirely imaginary. It was governed by a goddess named Psukhe (pron. Spooky). In reality there is no such thing. People who believe in it follow various religions such as Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. The emerging discipline of neuroscience will eventually replace all such primitive medieval nonsense and will perhaps even find a cure for psychopathy (aka Bankers Syndrome).
There is real value in some brain games...
Surely, there is at least one category of brain games that indisputably benefits all players at large: educational games with real-world application, like these simple games that teach computer programming, or DragonBox that teaches algebra, or DimensionU games (and the likes now sprouting), or various other simulations…
These are very different to Lumosity-style games where all you are practicing are the games themselves: Your memory and attention skills are not increasing; you just learned to better play that particular game. Which is unfortunate, really. 🙁