Can brain training keep your brain healthy?

‘Use it or lose it’ – is that the rule for keeping our brains fit and healthy? Brain training is based on the idea that practising mental exercises and keeping the brain active will help to improve, or at least maintain, our mental skills.

Scientific evidence

Unfortunately, at the moment, the hype and enthusiasm exceeds the scientific evidence. This does not mean that brain training doesn’t work, just that it hasn’t been properly and scientifically investigated. We know that practising brain-training games definitely improves performance on those specific games; the thing that we don’t know is whether the skills you improve by playing a game can transfer over and be useful in the rest of your life. For example being good at Sudoku is no guarantee that you’ll be able to manage a set of accounts.

Tantalising studies

There have been a few studies that hint that brain training could indeed improve your brain skills. In 2006 a long-term study showed that three groups of over 65s, who were given different brain training tasks, were able to improve the mental skills that they practised over five years.

It emerged from this study that some types of brain training are more effective than others, with benefits transferring over to improve the participants’ abilities to complete everyday tasks such as shopping and managing their finances. However, the training in this study was delivered in person, and required a lot of time. The logistics of developing such a brain training treatment would prevent it from being applied on a large scale.

In another study on a small group of people aged around 25 years showed that the benefits of intensive training on one particularly memory task could transfer to improve other brain skills. This study required intensive training, delivered in person, and required participants to work to the limit of their ability, so again it seems unlikely that this type of brain training could be useful on a large scale.

My interest

I’m particularly interested in finding out the potential value of brain training for older people. If brain training can help preserve our memory and thinking, as we get older, this could be a tremendous benefit to individuals and society. It could have a major impact on both the risk of developing, and the age at which you might develop serious brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease. But if brain training doesn’t work, people should not be encouraged to spend their money on false hope, and we should focus on other things that people could do to protect their brains more effectively.

Brain Test Britain

The BBC Lab UK experiment to test the benefit of brain training is extremely exciting, and has the potential to make an enormous contribution to the “brain health” of the nation. We want to find out if brain training really works and – if it does - what type of brain training is most effective. My contribution will be to interpret the data from people aged 60 or over, to see whether brain training has helped improve or preserve brain function.

Professor Clive Ballard is the Director of Research for the Alzheimer’s Society. He also leads a research group at King’s College London focusing on memory problems in later life.