Contrary to what marketing campaigns would have people believe,
a new scientific study suggests that brain training games only
train the brain to get better at brain training games. The
study, led by Adrian M. Owen and Adam Hampshire of the UK
Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and
published yesterday by the journal Nature, found no appreciable
cognitive benefits from a six-week stint of brain training
programs. "Although improvements were observed in every one of
the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for
transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were
cognitively closely related," the researchers concluded. The
study was conducted online with 11,430 participants divided into
three groups. One group was given brain training tests that
focused on problem-solving and reasoning, while another was
trained on a wider spectrum of tests focusing on short-term
memory, visuospatial processing, and math. A separate control
group was asked to comb the Inte