Train your brain

If you are ever in any doubt about the power of the human brain, take a look at Nintendo. Until very recently, things were not looking too good for the company that brought the world the wonders of Super Mario and Pokemon. Troubled by a narrow customer base and intense competition in the fast-moving world of computer games, Nintendo was struggling.

But then someone had a brainwave. Instead of just turning out products aimed at satisfying teenage boys’ obsession with fistfights and shoot outs, how about tapping into older consumers’ obsession with anything that offers the hope of slowing their inevitable decline? Very few entrepreneurs have ever lost money offering promises of physical youth, so why not try the same formula on the mental front?

Thus was born Brain Training, the computer game promising customers in their 30s and over a way of boosting their mental powers in spite of the damage caused by age and the general depredations of the years. In Nintendo’s ageing home market of Japan, it was a stupendous success. The DS consoles and the games raced off the shelves, leading to supply shortages across the country, and Brain Training suddenly became as manic a national obsession as Rubik’s cubes and Tamagotchi were in their time, a necessity for everyone from the thrusting salaryman in a hurry to inmates of old-age homes hoping to stave off dementia.

Whatever the effect on the national IQ, the impact on Nintendo’s finances is unmistakable. In the three months to the end of June, the company’s sales rose by an astonishing 85%, and operating profits soared to £131m from £17m in the same quarter last year. Released in Europe in June, Brain Training’s sales look like being just as strong, and there is no reason to believe the surge is over.

Nintendo’s game, which consists of a set of mathematical, word and memory tests, is not the only mental workout on the block. Sony offers the Brain Trainer, which operates on similar lines, Sega is developing a thinking-based game, Carol Vorderman’s digital version of sudoku is about to expand from PC to Play Station, and Dublin-based mobile phone developer Upstart Games is working on mobile-based versions of Right Brain Paradise, another Japanese mental workout.

On top of the continuing strength of sudoku and the enduring popularity of the trusty crossword, the brain game is clearly the market to be in. But, whatever the effect on their manufacturers’ bottom lines, whether these devices actually do what they promise is another question.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, says there is no doubt that using games such as Brain Training does something to your brain. ‘When you practise these games every day, then of course in a month you’ll get a bit better at them,’ she says. ‘And whenever you get better at something, something must have happened in the brain. That’s how you learn. Whenever you learn a new word or see a new face and recognise it, something in your brain has changed.

‘As far as I know, there’s been no brain research looking at these games, so we don’t know specifically how they affect the brain, but other tasks that are similar to this, like learning to play the piano or juggle or find your way around complicated cities, improve the specific areas of the brain that process those tasks, so it’s fair to assume that other tasks will affect the brain in the same way.

‘Speculatively, it could make you better at things like concentration and attention. There are a couple of studies showing that people who play video games are a bit better at things like ignoring distractions than other people. But what isn’t known is whether practising some task like, say, sudoku has a general effect on the brain.’

Beneficial

Chris Moulin, lecturer in cognitive neuropsychology at the University of Leeds, agrees that using devices like Brain Training may have beneficial effects that have nothing to do with brain function, but that is as far as it goes. ‘The mind isn’t like a muscle,’ he says. ‘You can’t train it that way. You might see yourself improve on this thing, and that might give you more self-confidence, so then you go back out into the world and you can function better at other things. But that’s not a real improvement in the basic mechanics of being able to solve problems or to think quickly. It’s a secondary effect.

‘Whether these things work for the kind of grand reasons that you might think they’re working – that they’re actually improving our mind – is very unlikely, and maybe it’s a bit unreasonable to suggest that they do.’

For that to be the case, Moulin says, it would need to be demonstrable that the benefits of practising this specific task flow through to other tasks. ‘Sure, the more you do something the better you’ll get at it,’ he says. ‘That’s called practice, and we’ve known about that for a long time. But it would be exciting if you showed it had transferable benefits, if you do task A over and over and over again, and then you get a new, completely different task B, and you’ve improved on that. But there’s no data that shows those kind of things.’

The only area in which that kind of transfer from one set of abilities to another has been shown to occur is, he says, with language. Studies have demonstrated that bilingual people not only have, as you would expect, better-developed language ability than others, but that they also show improvements in the totally separate cognitive area known as executive function, which covers problem-solving and reasoning. ‘That’s a task A versus task B scenario, and it’s very exciting.’

So, according to the experts, doing Brain Training games will not make you more intelligent or better at problem-solving, or harder-working, or more alert, or sensitive, or a champion at pub quizzes. What it will do is make you better at doing Brain Training games, just as practising sudoku will only make you better at sudoku. Until some research is done that demonstrates otherwise, there appears to be no basis for claiming any more.

Side-effects?

In fact, Moulin argues that the Brain Training games could even have a damaging clinical side-effect. ‘The tasks in this are very, very close to the tasks we use to test people for neuropsychological dysfunction,’ he says. ‘If you are suspected of dementia you are given tasks pretty much as shown on that computer game, which would suggest that it would diminish our ability to accurately diagnose people. If people are practising these games and they have some underlying problem, that will mask the underlying problem. That’s a fairly major worry.’

Despite the best efforts of games manufacturers to convince us otherwise, the solid and unpalatable fact remains that our brain function declines as we age. ‘No one really knows whether it’s deterioration or whether it’s simply that your brain is clogged up with memories,’ says Blakemore. ‘But from the age of about 40 you do start, very subtly and very gradually, to become worse at remembering things.’

But that does not mean you cannot take proven and effective steps to slow that decline. Brain health is closely connected to physical health, and the first step towards keeping your brain in decent shape is looking after your body. Smoking and heavy drinking, for example, are related to massive cell death, so that is a good place to start.

‘There’s some evidence that physical exercise can boost the brain cells,’ says Blakemore. ‘New brain cells and new connections grow and it boosts blood flow to the brain. There’s also sleep. When you’re asleep at night, and even if you’re having a nap after lunch, the brain replays things that you’ve done during the day, which helps memory. Not sleeping can have a deteriorative effect on remembering things that you learned the day before. There is also evidence that people who have a lifestyle that involves lots of mental stimulation are much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than people who don’t.’

Then there is the question of attitude. ‘These things all interact massively with mood,’ says Moulin. ‘Having a positive mental attitude is the most important thing. There are all kinds of interesting studies that show that in cultures such as the Chinese culture which have a positive view of ageing, where you are regarded as becoming wise and more useful as you get older, people show less cognitive decline than, say, in American culture where that stereotype doesn’t exist.

‘Mental attitude and self-efficacy are critical. If there are any positive effects from these kind of brain training things, I would imagine it’s from there.’

So by all means hone your skills on a Brain Training machine if you want, because it probably will not do you any harm and it might simply be fun. But do not expect too much. If you really want to stave off the darkness, go for a swim, read a book, have a nap, and try to be positive, even if you did not buy Nintendo shares when you had the chance.

Richard Brass is a freelance columnist and feature writer.