Dr. Kawashima and Nintendo were right: brain training games can actually have significant positive effects and reduce the effects of aging on our brains. A new scientific research found that our efforts to play them can offset as much as ten years of aging, which is good news if you've spent a very long time playing “brain training” games.
The key finding was that performing rigorous mental exercise for 30 minutes a day increased levels of the chemical messenger acetylcholine, which not only transmits messages through the brain, but also improves learning, memory and attention functions. Acetylcholine levels generally decline with age.
The study followed 95 people over 65 for 10 weeks and found a 2.3 percent increase in acetylcholine levels after doing brain training exercises for 30 minutes a day. How NPR As the article about the report notes, 2.3 percent doesn't seem huge, but consider that a 2.5 percent decline is typically seen. per decade due to aging, he rethinks the discovery. Brain training games can compensate for decades of degradation caused by aging.
However, there is an important distinction to make. To achieve the desired results, you need to play games specifically designed to train these parts of your brain, such as Nintendo's Brain Training game. Candy Crush and solitaire won't do it; Half of the participants played them during the test, and their acetylcholine levels did not change.
Dr. Ryuta Kawashima was a neuroscientist with whom Nintendo developed games, and brain age (as the game was called in Japan) and dementia prevention are his special areas of expertise. In other words: that's exactly what he was trying to achieve with his Nintendo games.
Brain training games first appeared here in 2006. They consisted of a lot of fun games based on math, memory recovery and many other things, and you played them every day and the game gave scores based on your results. In our review, we gave the original Brain Training a 9/10.and the series will have many sequels and even a Switch version released in 2020.
