Brain Exercises: Do they work? (chapter 4)

It’s safe to say that mental fitness has graduated in status from cottage to full-blown industry. It’s grown fast, and without much oversight.

Anyone can move in to your town and set up a brain “gym,” just as anyone can set up a mental fitness “club” on the internet, and there’s no one around to validate the “lose ten years off your memory in just seven sessions” claims that often come with them. So far there is no industry standard, and no watchdog group.
This is not a problem if you don’t really care if there is any science behind the exercises you’re doing, or if they are having a deeper effect than giving you pleasure and making you feel that you are taking charge of your life. I have games on my Ipod that are entertaining and seem to stretch my brain, but I’m under no illusion that they will, for instance, boost my score on a standardized memory test or, more crucially, help me remember to bring home brown sugar and beets from the market.
One way that companies get around the fact that their products are not backed up by rigorous, unbiased science, is to put together what they call a scientific advisory board, as if having people with doctorates or medical degrees on their masthead automatically confers authenticity. Caveat Emptor.
As I mentioned earlier, I am a fan of a website called My Brain Trainer that has lots of engaging exercises. Anecdotally—and this is the key word—people say that doing these exercises makes them “sharper.” This may or may not be true, and there is no way to know, and no way to know what, precisely, sharper means. On the site there is reference to a study done five years at place called the DeLos Mind-Body Institute in Texas. There were fifty subjects in all, ages 44-48, some assigned to a control group, the others to do 21 sessions of MBT exercises. Their IQ was tested using something called Virtual Knowledge software. After a month, according to the researcher, Dr. Marshall Voris, those doing the brain exercises had a nine-point increase in IQ, while the control group had a 1 percent increase.
This is an impressive outcome, until you devote a corner of your own IQ to sorting it out. There were fifty participants, total, and it’s not clear how many were controls and how many did the exercise. Whatever the breakdown, the number itself is probably too small to draw widely applicable inferences from. But, more important is the sample itself: the fifty subjects are between 44 and 48 years old, which is hardly a random sample. Enough said.
This is not to say that brain trainers don’t work, just that the measures that are used to sell them to you are often less than satisfying. One question that you have to ask yourself before plunking down your cash is “what do I want to get out of this.” If you’re hoping for some reason to raise your score on an IQ test, that’s one thing. If you want to bring home brown sugar and beets, that’s another.