BBC study

Recently the BBC thought it would be a good idea to run a mass-participation

brain training study. About 11,000 people volunteered to sign up for the online

project and the BBC assigned each participant to one of three groups. In the first

group – reasoning brain training – people had to solve tasks that involved plan-

ning and analysing the problem to come up with a response. They had to choose

problems from categories like pop music and history. In the second group – non-

reasoning brain training – people had tasks that involved short-term memory and

attention tasks. And the final group – the control group – didn’t actually participate

in any training but spent a similar amount of time on the computer as the reasoning

and non-reasoning brain training groups.

What were the results? The first finding was that people got better at the task – the

practice effect. In other words, playing the reasoning games meant that people

got better at those types of tasks. In contrast, the control group didn’t show any

improvement in reasoning tasks, which isn’t surprising given that they weren’t

training at all.

The next finding was that none of the training transferred to any other tasks. So

although people got better at the training games, that didn’t help them perform

better in other activities. Although this result may seem surprising, several reasons

exist:

 ✓ The first is that the games themselves were targeting very specific knowledge-

based activities, like history or pop music. So perhaps it’s not that surprising

that knowing a lot about pop music won’t help you remember your shopping list.

 ✓ Another problem is that the group of people participating in the study was

self-selecting, which means that the participants chose to sign up, and they

weren’t monitored by rigorous experimental procedure. Big differences in how

regularly people chose to use the training programme existed, which may have

affected the results.

 ✓ And an additional issue was that the participants were highly educated and

aged between 18 and 60 years of age. The training programme may have been

too easy for the participants, and as a result the programme may not have chal-

lenged the participants sufficiently to see any benefits of training.

So what’s the bottom line? Brain training does work. You just need to make sure

that you’re doing the right thing.