If you were one of the many millions who ran out and bought a gadget to train your brain in the hope it will exercise your grey matter and boost your brain power, prepare to be disappointed.
According to a recent study, playing the computer games will do nothing other than improve your game play, it won’t make you smarter.
The study was carried out by the BBC’s “Bang Goes the Theory” TV programme and involved more than 11,430 participants from the UK.
The aim was to find out if brain training games could actually boost brain power, as millions currently believe, however, the results said otherwise.
The study involved giving all the participants brain tests which came from the Medical Research Council and Alzheimer’s society. Then they were split in three different groups.
One group were given games to test planning and problem solving skills, another group focussed on games for memory and maths and spatial awareness, and the third group concentrated on general knowledge questions which they had to research online.
At the end of the study which lasted six weeks, the groups were tested again but there was no real difference in scores at the end of the test from the original scores.
Dr Adrian Owen, one of the researchers from the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, said: “Brain training, or the quest to improve brain function through regular use of computer tests, is a multimillion-pound industry, yet up until now there’s been a real lack of robust evidence to show it really works.
“Our findings will no doubt surprise millions of people worldwide who do some form of brain training every day in the belief that ‘exercising’ their brain makes them better at everyday thinking tasks.
“In one of our computer games that tests memory by assessing how many numbers could be remembered by players, we found it would take almost four years of playing brain training games regularly each week to remember just one extra digit.”
Dallas Campbell, presenter of Bang Goes the Theory, said: “Millions of us play brain training games on the assumption that expensive games make us better at everyday thinking tasks, but until now there’s been no evidence to prove that these games work at all.
“We set out to gather real, scientific evidence that would answer the question of whether these games are worth our money. And now we have our answer.”
They maybe have their answer, I mean it fits in with Bang Goes the Theory and all that, but is it true?
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