Discoveries Of A Study Into Improving Memory By Using Mind Training
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
If you are searching for techniques to improve your memory, a clear and rather interesting option is to play brain training games. These are developed not only to help with improving memory, but also to strengthen your other mental skills, such as problem-solving. Every time you play, you certainly get speedier and more accurate and get improved scores in the games. The question that is not often posed is whether or not these game-playing skills are then relevant to other elements of your life.
The multi-million dollar brain training games industry would no doubt claim that its mental exercises are based on sound neurological theory and that therefore there is a reasonable possibility of improving your memory and other skills through using its mind exercise software. They have not however, at least to my knowledge, published the results of any studies that they have made into this area.
Well, recently the very revealing results of a large UK study into the effectiveness of brain exercises on improving memory etc. have been published, and they are probably not what you would have predicted. BBC television conducted this research in conjunction with the British Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer’s Society.
The research team enrolled 13000 adult volunteers to take part in their rigorous experiment over a period of six weeks. The goal was to see whether training the brain on a number of activities designed to employ different regions of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would strengthen mental skills, such as memory and problem-solving capabilities.
In accordance with proper experimental design practice, there were two groups of participants in the experiment. Volunteers were randomly assigned either to the experimental or the control group.
The experimental group spent ten minutes a day for six weeks playing a set of brain training games designed to exercise a large spectrum of mental skills including memory. When retested at the end of the study, their ability to perform the brain games they had trained on had improved by a third, against their initial performance in them. The control group spent the same amount of time as the others surfing the internet.
The purpose of the research was to observe if getting experienced at brain training activities would produce improvement in the same skills when utilized in a different circumstance. So both groups of subjects were tested before and following the study in their capacity to carry out activities such as problem-solving and reproducing number sequences.
If you believe that brain training games can play a part in improving memory, then you might find the results a little surprising. There was actually a small improvement in the performance of both groups and what’s more this improvement was virtually identical in the two groups. So even though there was some improvement, the lack of statistical significance between the two sets’ results means that this could not be attributed to the training.
So if you have been playing these brain training games with the intention of improving your memory, is it time to give them up and put them out to pasture? Well, that is entirely up to you, but do bear in mind that studies, no matter what their size, can be flawed and that what does not work for some people could work for you. If you really care about improving memory, then there are many other memory strategies you can explore, such as playing sports, taking a look at improving your diet and even going to the odd concert.
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags
Possible Related Posts
Findings Of Research For Improving Memory By Applying Mental TrainingBrain Workout For Exact Regions of IntelligenceDeveloping Your NLP Skills Can Easily Lead To Improving Memory
