If you are looking for strategies to improve your memory, a clear and really interesting solution is to participate in brain training games. These are created not only to help with improving memory, but also to strengthen your other mental competencies, such as problem-solving. Each time you play, you surely get quicker and more accurate and get improved scores in the tasks. The question that is not always asked is whether or not these game-playing abilities are consequently relevant to other elements of your life.
You might be forgiven for thinking that all the brain training games have been designed taking the ever-increasing body of brain science into account. Indeed, a lot is already known about the neurological underpinnings of how memory is laid down in the first place, and then improved. Maybe they have been designed this way, but where is the evidence of how successful you can be using these exercises?
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.
They intended to learn whether playing a number of computer-based games, including memory exercises, over a six week period, all created to exercise different parts of the brain, would result in individuals in the study to be better equipped to make use of their brain abilities in other areas not related to playing brain training games. The research included a good cross-section of 13000 of the adult British public.
The volunteers were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The first group did a broad range of brain exercises, including ones for improving memory, for ten minutes every other day for six weeks. Since the tasks were internet-based, the control group just used the internet for the same amount of time. At the end of the trial period, the brain training group was retested on the brain exercises and was found to be 33 per cent better at performing the brain games they had trained on.
The intention of the study was to discover whether becoming experienced at brain training activities would produce improvement in the same abilities when utilized in a different circumstance. So both groups of subjects were tested before and following the experiment in their ability 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.
However, people who enjoy brain exercises should not lose heart. Firstly, speaking from personal experience, if nothing else, they are a lot of fun! Beyond that, even though you should not expect them to help with improving memory, there are certainly a number of other strategies for improving your memory and other mental abilities, which have been scientifically-proven. These include diet, reading, taking physical exercise and listening to music.
