Professors create free research-backed games to train your brain

Perhaps with more traning, your brain will be better at helping you avoid aggressive 'YES' buttons :)

Now, the control for these experiments was amusing:

for one of the sessions:

> which played regular, dumb computer games

What would be a 'dumb' game is fascinating.

You'd have to find something that provokes no brain stimulation at all, no skill evolution while still being a game. Then if the 'game' was really completely void of content but the players kept playing it, would they end up in a kind o meditative state, potentially causing their abilities to increase ?

Another control group were doing crosswords, I guess to get a "well known quantity", but aren't crosswords also pretty demanding games depending on the people doing it? I'd be worse at crossword than building raiding strategies in an RPG for instance.

Somewhere I have the feeling these studies are deeply flawed with a lot of unchecked assumptions. Not by laziness per se, but it just seems that cognitive fields are inherently hard for rigorous studies.

"Finally, the big hope had been to motivate students to learn through interactivity and “gamification.” What any given software vendor might tout as a stimulating lesson, however, is often just a frustrating distraction for students. The case of edustar basketball shows that even highly engaged students may not be learning any­thing at all: in a randomized controlled trial, more than five hundred students were assigned either to an ordinary module teaching how to divide fractions or to a module teaching the same topic using a basketball game–like computer program. Students assigned to the basketball game spent about five minutes longer on the lesson, but performed significantly worse than students following the regular method. Ultimately, tech that boosted student engagement just took a longer time to teach them less."

I do think many games today don't teach this though. You need to be able to lose. Old games made you lose constantly, you had to learn the patterns and build up your reflexes and coordination. Much of life is actually like this. It's a valuable skill to be able to keep going at something until you get it. I've seen a lot of people just give up on things at the first hint of difficulty, video games taught me not to do that and because of this, i'll push and keep learning skills even when it gets frustrating and not so fun. There's a lot of things I would've given up on if I hadn't learned that the rewards for pushing through are usually worth it.

This makes no sense. People exercise for 30 minutes a day, or read, or clean, or play video games, or watch TV, or tend to a garden, or do yoga.

Why are all these feasible but exercising your brain is not?

There is this thing called self-discipline which many of us exercise. Last January I bought a guitar as a complete novice, and 30 minutes a day later I've written over a hundred songs and some of them are quite good.

Sometimes I didn't have 30 minutes a day. That meant an hour the next day, or a few hours over the weekend. It's all about what your goals are, not feasibility.

Maybe these games are so far mediocre because there haven't been many made yet, and most creative endeavors are mediocre. It doesn't mean that it's not possible to make an awesome memory-training game.

One of the theories on why they are effective (doubting the main interpretation that they train your working memory/cognitive processing) is that the game trains you to endure frustration and at some point also boredom. Dealing with frustration and boredom are actually important success skills - so if there was a way to get the game more engaging there's a good chance that the positive impact would be reduced.

tl;dr: issue is still under debate, but it might well be that the need to endure boredom/frustration in at least the dual-n-back games might be a feature (that improves impact) rather than a bug.

(Historical caveats about trusting the results of a single training study apply)

http://www.academia.edu/download/36902540/2015_ActaPsych_Mor...

[0] https://davefernig.com/2020/01/17/experimental-controls-as-o...

> Students who played Alien Game at a high level of challenge (i.e., reaching a high level in the game) developed significantly better performance on cognitive shifting tests compared to controls when they played for 2 h (Experiment 1, d = 1.44), but not when they played for 1 h (Experiment 2).

Probably it was a card sorting test. This sounds to me like "people who practiced card sorting got better at card sorting."

Backed by a single simple study with too small a sample size and little or no control group, paid for by the group currently making the claim (a group who may have commissioned several other studies but didn't have them published because the results were not as complimentary to their cause).

That's all the endorsement we need.

I quit playing videogames when I was about 16 or 17 and I still look back on that as one of the best decisions I've ever made.

> Really, the only downside I see with them is that they can displace exercise and face-to-face communication -- I know games can be social, but you really just need time talking to other people with no distractions. But if you balance your life appropriately, why not?

My issue with video games is that playing them too much, especially when young, increases your dopamine tolerance too much. Many of them are designed to be addicting.

I have mostly stopped playing video games and feel mental well being has significantly improved.

Of course, that's not to say I think they should be banned or anything but in my humble opinion you are ignoring the significant downsides of playing video games. That being said, I have many fond memories and friendships created through video games too! Like most things there's good and bad.

Also I don’t really get your point anyways. I’d think expanding one’s mind would be accomplished by routines with good variety, and see no reason why there needs to be a choice between play outside and play on a tablet. Especially when a child is too young to really do much without supervision...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back:

> Two studies published in 2012 failed to reproduce the effect of dual n-back training on fluid intelligence. These studies found that the effects of training did not transfer to any other cognitive ability tests.[12][13] In 2014, a meta-analysis of twenty studies showed that n-back training has small but significant effect on Gf and improve it on average for an equivalent of 3-4 points of IQ.[14] In January 2015, this meta-analysis was the subject of a critical review due to small-study effects.[15] The question of whether n-back training produces real-world improvements to working memory remains controversial.