Brain Training: Which is the Best Brain Boost Exercise?

Brain Training

Have you ever tried brain training? There are a variety of different brain exercises out there. Some are scientifically proven to work better than others. ScienceDaily recently published an article about a research presented by John Hopkins University. I have posted the main points in this blog post.

Though this exercise didn’t make anyone smarter, it greatly improved skills people need to excel at school and at work. These results, published this week by the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, suggest it’s possible to train the brain like other body parts — with targeted workouts.

Scientists trying to determine if brain exercises improve cognitive performance have had mixed luck. Johns Hopkins researchers suspected the problem wasn’t the idea of brain training, but the type of exercise researchers chose to test it. They decided to compare directly the leading types of exercises and measure people’s brain activity before and after training; that had never been attempted before, according to Blacker, now a researcher at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for Advancement of Military Medicine Inc.

The training programs Johns Hopkins compared are not the commercial products available sold to consumers, but tools scientists rely on to test the brain’s working memory.

The findings demonstrate that the “dual n-back” is a better regimen to train working memory, which is what people rely on to temporarily hold details in their mind like phone numbers and directions. These skills are vital to how people perform in school and at work, when tasks are new and you can’t just rely on old knowledge and habits, says co-author Susan Courtney, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist and professor of psychological and brain sciences.

“The biggest lesson here was that — yes — intensive training strengthens cognition and the brain, but we still don’t understand why and how,” Courtney said. “We can’t just jump onto a video game and expect that’s going to cure all of our cognitive problems. We need more targeted interventions.”

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