Spend several hours using mental training games (brain training) on the screen of the computer may have little effect on our brain. To prove this, a team from the Cognitive and Brain Sciences unit at the British Council for Medical Research (UK), led by Adrian Owen, recruited more than 8,600 people between the ages of 18 and 60 to play online games, three times per week, to “intelligence games” developed by researchers to improve memory, reasoning and other skills.
The participants were compared with more than 2,700 people who spent the same time surfing the internet . All participants took an IQ test before and after the experiment. The results revealed that people who did brain training did not perform better after six weeks of practice than people who only entertained themselves online, according to the researchers. Even in some sections of the test, people who surfed the net scored better than those who had trained in intelligence games. The study was sponsored by the BBC and published in the online edition of the journal Nature .
“If someone uses these games because they are fun, it is great,” said Adrian Owen. “But if you expect them to improve their IQ, our data indicates that they will not ,” he added. Undoubtedly, say the authors, the concrete results obtained in the cognitive tests of the games improve with training. The point is, these benefits have no impact on other untrained cognitive tasks , so they don’t lead to any overall improvement in intelligence.
