It is true that brain training computer games are fantastic fun and if you play them frequently you may certainly get better and better at playing them. You may well consider that in playing them, you are taking steps for improving memory and for sharpening up all your other mental faculties. It is reasonable to assume this, but how do we know that there has actually been any progress? Do we actually have scientific evidence of the effectiveness of these mental exercises?

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?

So BBC television in the UK decided to undertake a large-scale study. They teamed up with the Alzheimer’s Society and the British Medical Research Council, and together they came up with a scientific study of the effects of playing brain training games on people’s ability to remember things and other mental skills. The published results were quite surprising.

They took on 13000 adult volunteers to get involved in their rigorous experiment for six weeks. The purpose was to see whether training the brain on a number of tasks engineered to employ different areas of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would enhance brain abilities, such as memory and problem-solving skills.

In accordance with proper experimental design practice, there were two groups of participants in the experiment. Volunteers were randomly assigned either to the experimental or the control group.

The experimental group spent ten minutes a day for six weeks playing a set of brain training games designed to exercise a large spectrum of mental skills including memory. When retested at the end of the study, their ability to perform the brain games they had trained on had improved by a third, against their initial performance in them. The control group spent the same amount of time as the others surfing the internet.

The intention of the research was to observe whether getting skilled at brain training tasks would result in improvement in the same skills when used in a different context. So both groups of test subjects were tested prior to and following the study in their capacity to accomplish tasks such as problem-solving and reproducing strings of numbers.

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.