Saturday, July 15, 2017

Turns out, brain games don't make you smarter after all

Have you ever thought that the claims of those brain-training games like Lumosity seemed too good to be true? Well, you were probably right.
Games and apps like Lumosity like to claim that, by playing their games, we can train out brains to be stronger, faster and better. But a study by Dr. Joseph Kable at the University of Pennsylvania, which looked at changes in the "executive function" of people who engage in brain-training games, other recreational video games, and no games at all, indicates that brain games actually have no effect at all on measures like working memory, attention focus, decision-making, and general brain activity.
This came as quite a shock to Dr. Kable, who was expecting his study to back up the claims of Lumosity et al. The study, which was recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience, will come as a blow to brain-game companies, which may now have to temper some of their more outlandish claims.

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