Can Games Help Improve Cognitive Ability?

We live in a time where many of us live humdrum, repetitive lives, where our daily routines are consistent and non-varied, so keeping our brains stimulated is an important part of feeling healthy. Our jobs may be monotonous - offering us very little that will help motivate or encourage our brain functions - but thankfully there are lots of things we can do to help keep our minds refreshed and revitalised. You may have heard of brain training tools, apps and games you can download on your smartphone, tablet or mobile-based device that claim to develop your memory, numerical reasoning and other brain-related aspects. But how can these games actually help improve brain function?

Brain training games are becoming increasingly popular, as well as numeric-based games that are commonly found on the plethora of bingo websites available on the net, and many experts believe these pastimes can go a long way in helping to improve brain function.

Research has been carried out which strongly assessed the link between these types of games and other such gaming experiences that can assist with cognitive ability. It is already believed that such bite-sized gaming tasks can actually help people who deal with a range of various brain-related issues -providing a therapeutic tool for those who suffer from disorders such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or even dementia.

Whilst these initial findings are encouraging, the question still remains: how can these in-game skills and abilities actually translate into everyday life? Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a game called NeuroRacer that features a virtual car that requires the player to respond when they see various road signs on screen. As each player improves, he/she is then taken up a level and the difficulty increases. When players who trained with the game were then asked to complete a series of memory and attention tests their results were notably higher than that of the control group.

Additional tests also measured brain wave activity, which also pointed positively to improved cognitive ability. What’s most interesting about these results is that adult brains are actually more susceptible to change than some experts may have initially believed. As you get older, and your brain functions deteriorate somewhat, this phenomenon is popularly considered to be a natural decline and little could be done to help reverse the decline. However, the research - and hopefully future testing - could actually reveal that games and other brain training related experiences could actually help increase cognitive capacity and even improve the brain's ability to recall, calculate, formulate and react faster than ever before.