The 5 conditions for brain training to work

[Sir]

Here's an article from sharp brains listing the conditions for brain training to work,

http://sharpbrains.com/blog/2013/05/22/does-brain-training-work-yes-if-it-meets-these-5-conditions/

1. It must engage and exer­cise a core brain-based capac­ity or neural cir­cuit iden­ti­fied to be rel­e­vant to real-life out­comes, such as exec­u­tive atten­tion, work­ing mem­ory, speed of pro­cess­ing and emo­tional reg­u­la­tion, as well as oth­ers dis­cussed through­out the inter­views with sci­en­tists in this book. Many sup­posed “brain train­ing” games fail to pro­vide any actual “brain train­ing” because they were never really designed to tar­get spe­cific and rel­e­vant brain functions.
2. It must tar­get a per­for­mance bot­tle­neck – oth­er­wise it is an exer­cise in van­ity sim­i­lar to build­ing the largest biceps in town while neglect­ing the rest of the body. A crit­i­cal ques­tion to ask is: Which brain func­tion do I need to opti­mize? With phys­i­cal fit­ness, effec­tive train­ing begins with a tar­get in mind: Is the goal to train abdom­i­nal mus­cles? Biceps? Car­dio capac­ity? So it goes for brain fit­ness, where the ques­tion becomes: Is the goal to opti­mize driving-related cog­ni­tive skills? Con­cen­tra­tion? Mem­ory? Reg­u­lat­ing stress and emo­tions? The choice of a tech­nique or tech­nol­ogy should be dri­ven by your goal. For instance, if you need to train your exec­u­tive func­tions but use a pro­gram designed to enhance speed of pro­cess­ing, you may well con­clude that this pro­gram does not “work.” But this pro­gram may work for some­body whose bot­tle­neck is speed of pro­cess­ing (as often hap­pens in older adults).
3. A min­i­mum “dose” of 15 hours total per tar­geted brain func­tion, per­formed over 8 weeks or less, is nec­es­sary for real improve­ment. Train­ing only a few hours across a wide vari­ety of brain func­tions, such as in the “BBC brain train­ing” exper­i­ment, should not be expected to trig­ger real-world ben­e­fits, in the same way that going to the gym a cou­ple times per month and doing an assort­ment of undi­rected exer­cises can­not be expected to result in increased mus­cle strength and phys­i­cal fitness.
4. Train­ing must adapt to per­for­mance, require effort­ful atten­tion, and increase in dif­fi­culty. This is a key advan­tage of com­put­er­ized “brain train­ing” over pen-and-paper-based activ­i­ties. Think about the num­ber of hours you have spent doing cross­word or Sudoku puz­zles, or mas­ter­ing any new sub­ject for that mat­ter, in a way that was either too easy for you and became bor­ing or way too dif­fi­cult and became frus­trat­ing. Inter­ac­tive train­ing has the capac­ity to con­stantly mon­i­tor your level of per­for­mance and adapt accordingly.
5. Con­tin­ued prac­tice is required for con­tin­ued ben­e­fits. Just as you wouldn’t expect to derive life­long ben­e­fits from run­ning a few hours this month, and then not exer­cis­ing ever again, you shouldn’t expect life­long ben­e­fits from a one-time brain train­ing activ­ity. Remem­ber that “cells that fire together wire together” – while the min­i­mum dose described above may act as a thresh­old to start see­ing some ben­e­fits, con­tin­ued prac­tice, either at a reduced num­ber of hours or as a peri­odic “booster,” is a final con­di­tion for trans­fer to real-world ben­e­fits over time

[Marco Kalel]

Thanks. Useful information.