According to a study published recently on a journal called Nature, brain games won’t necessarily improve your cognitive skills. This ruled out the million-dollar claim of a computer gaming industry which sold electronic memory games and brain teasers. For the longest time, people actually believed that they could improve their brain fitness by playing electronic “brain games”. Apparently, the skills don’t affect your cognition.
While these brain games can improve your brain’s ability to carry out a specific task, your brain improves only on that isolated area. It doesn’t raise your IQ or make you think faster. In a nutshell, it just employs the “practice makes perfect” principle. When you’re so used to searching online for trivia answers for a brain game, you become faster at it as time goes by. Sometimes, you may even remember certain trivial facts.
The test which was conducted simulated brain games as well. The subjects were divided into three groups. The first group concentrated on problem solving, planning, and basic reasoning. The second group of participants were asked to perform memory enhancing activities, attention exercises, and a series of more complicated tasks for math, visual and spatial processing.
The third group, which is the control group, was asked to research the answers for trivia questions online. After six weeks, all of the participants were given cognitive-assessment battery tests which were unrelated to the activities they just went through. All tests came out identical: there was a very minor improvement when it came to the participant’s cognitive skills.
Mental Health Providers in Oregon have been researching this subject for years, and now, it seems they’ve finally come up with the answer. Too bad half of Asia is still playing these things. Not me! 