Brain Games Take Hit from Brits

The bad news first: A large study in Great Britain shows that people are spending millions of dollars on brain-gym-type exercises that don’t actually strengthen their cognitive powers. The good news: plenty of better, less expensive, more fun, more social, more wholesome things probably do boost your brain power.

The study, a collaboration between researchers the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and BBC Lab UK website, was published in Nature online on Tuesday. It divided a small army of 11,430 test subjects down into three groups.  The first spent at least ten minutes a day, three days a week, doing exercises that focused on problem-solving. The second group, spent the same amount of time doing exercises that focused on short-term memory, attention, visuo-spatial abilities and math; these were similar to the kinds of cognitive workout commercial brain-strengthening products push. The third batch, the control group, spent the same amount of time using the web, or whatever resources they wanted, looking up answers to esoteric questions.  Over the study’s six-week period, the first two groups improved a little bit at the skills they were practicing, but those improvements didn’t translate to more general cognitive abilities such as memory, reasoning and learning. Basically, practicing games makes you better at the games, but not better at thinking.

Adrian Owen, who led the study, is a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. He says that hope that brain software  will make you smarter is “completely unsupported.”

I argued that the science didn’t prove the validity of brain training both in my first blog entry here and in an article I wrote for San Francisco Magazine last year.  After interviewing lots of top neuroscientists, none of whom spent their time on brain training software, I asked them what they did to keep themselves sharp. No big surprises, but the secret to success is sometimes hidden in the obvious: they all agreed that the brain likes to ride atop a healthy body, it like the oxygen hit it gets from aerobic exercise, it likes to be engaged in meaningful activity (aka work that matters), good food, and probably sex. Sounds better than playing computer games, doesn’t it? 

Upping the Pace in Brainy Rat Race

In a clever experiment on lab rats, Taiwanese researchers found that while a pleasurable run may significantly improve cognition, a painfully challenging one boosts it more. The study is described in an article by Gretchen Reynolds in Sunday’s New York Times. The research, conducted at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, had some rats run at their own pace on cage wheels, which they apparently enjoy, and forced others to keep up a higher pace on treadmills, which they don’t like so much. Both groups performed better at various brain-dependent tasks than a control group--which used brain fitness software, but did not exercise--but the second, harder-running group of mice did better than the first. In explanation, Henriette van Praag, an investigator in the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, tells Reynolds: ‘“It appears that various growth factors must be carried from the periphery of the body into the brain to start a molecular cascade there,” creating new neurons and brain connections. For that to happen, “you need a fairly dramatic change in blood flow.”

A Safer, Sexier Approach to Brain Fitness

While brain fitness software might help some to recover lost cognitive function and memory power-- especially the stuff with serious research behind it like Posit Science's--there are a few things that neuroscientists pretty much all agree are good for your brain. I focused research for my story about brain training at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, where I asked some of the world's top neuroscientists what they did to keep their own brains humming. Not a single one (except Michael Merzenich, the founder and president of Posit) said they used brain fitness software. Instead, they cited exercise, challenging their minds by mastering new skills (memorize a poem, learn to tango, study a new language, publish another paper), eating well (foods with lots of antioxidants such as blueberries and walnuts, and foods with Omega-3 fatty acids), and engaging in stress relieving activities (hiking, music, meditation, sex). All the researchers also agreed that meaningful work helps a lot; the attention that comes from caring about what you’re trying to do is key to engaging your brain’s learning and memory functions. It's a small survey of scientists, not science, but, assuming they are rational, it's probably good advice. Anyway, their approach is not only good for the brain, it’s what someone with a good head would probably want to do anyway.

Brain Fitness Software: Hype or Bologna?

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, KQED Radio, the biggest local NPR station, is well into its Fall fund-raising drive. Once again, it’s promoting--as a gift to big donors--“brain fitness” products from Posit Science in San Francisco. I’ve used the software, which is supposed to stimulate users' brains to make new connections and fortify important ones, and I don’t think its going to hurt anyone. It might well even help. But the KQED announcers’ repeated promise that it is “scientifically proven to make you smarter and help you recover lost brain function” is bunk, as I found researching this skeptical article about the burgeoning brain fitness movement for San Francisco Magazine. It’s notoriously hard to test this kind of software scientifically, the placebo effect alone blows the current studies out of the water, and the efforts to do so have produced ambiguous results, at best. Take a look at this buyer beware statement from the Stanford Center on Longevity.