A red flag always goes up in my mind when I see an entire industry sprout up around something that doesn’t have a lot of research backing. That’s been the problem with these so-called “brain games” — you know, those video or online games that supposedly improve your memory or thinking.
Makers of these games like to point to studies of people who were older (usually seniors), had existing memory or cognitive problems or other issues who engaged in specific tasks and then were shown to have some improvement in memory or cognition. Few studies have been done on these games with everyday folks like you and I. And fewer still studies have been done on the specific games being marketed to consumers (often the studies use tasks that the games then try and replicate, but we don’t know if they’re replicating all the important bits or not). And fewer still studies have been done and published in peer-reviewed professional journals (not just on people’s websites).
So when the prestigious journal Nature publishes a study about real brain games used on a large sample size, this is going to be a piece of research that gets our attention.