Below is an article from an online psychology journal which says
researchers Katrijn Houben at Maastricht University in Netherlands
found that training working memory could enhance executive control. It
looks like the computer training task is similar to dual n back but
not quite. After participants used the training game they were able to
better reframe from drinking(her/his control and experimental groups
had alcohol addictions).
I am sorry that I am simply posting this article but I could not find
the extract. I would be thankful if anyone here can find the official
research along with the training gams.
"What do cheating on your diet, overreacting to a tantrum thrown by
your child, and having a drink even though you decided to stop
drinking have in common? They all involve failures of self-control.
The ability to control unwanted behaviors is at the heart of what
psychologists term executive control. Executive control is an umbrella
term that refers to a collection of cognitive functions - such as
attention, planning, memory, initiating actions and inhibiting them.
When our impulses get the best of us, a failure in executive control
is often to blame.
Fortunately, these failures are not inevitable. In fact, a paper
published last week in the journal Psychological Science suggests that
failures of executive control can be diminished by training our
working memory.
Working memory, housed in the prefrontal cortex, is strongly related
to executive control. People with less working memory have poor
executive functioning and training working memory improves executive
control. Because of this, Katrijn Houben and her colleagues at
Maastricht University in the Netherlands set out to test whether
strengthening people's working memory might help them control their
impulses.
They decided to look at impulse control in heavy drinkers. So, they
invited people who drank upwards of 30 drinks per week to complete a
series of on-line working memory training sessions. There were 25
sessions in total spread out over roughly a month's time and folks
took part in either a treatment or placebo training group.
In the treatment group, people went through an intensive working
memory training program that involved a variety of verbal and spatial
tasks designed to exercise working memory. In one task, the treatment
group saw letters - one by one - on a computer screen. They were to
remember the letters as they appeared and then to recall them in the
exact opposite order in which they had been originally presented. This
type of backwards memory task is quite hard because you have to keep
track of what is presented to you and reverse it in your head. This
reversing is the "working" part of working memory. Critically, as
people got better and better at the backwards memory task, the
difficulty - that is, how many items they had to remember and reverse
in mind - increased. In essence, the training was always pushing
people to work their working memory a bit more.
Folks in the placebo group also performed a variety of activities on
the computer that were similar to those done by those in the treatment
group. However, when people in the placebo group performed the
backwards memory task described above, they only had to remember a few
items and the number of items never increased. The placebo group had
much less of a working memory workout.
Not surprisingly, people in the treatment group got better on the
working memory tasks they trained on. But these folks also improved on
other executive control tasks that they had not practiced. Even more
impressive, people in the treatment group reduced their alcohol intake
by about 10 glasses a week compared to what they drank before the
study (with the biggest reductions for those with the strongest
impulses to drink alcohol). People in the placebo group did not show a
change in their drinking behavior.
A month after the training was over, study participants were invited
back on-line and their working memory and alcohol intake was assessed
once again. The training benefits remained - both in terms of the
boost to working memory and the reduction in alcohol intake.
Of course, more research is needed to figure out just how long these
effects last and whether working memory training can help control
alcohol use in clinical samples of alcohol abusers. Nonetheless, this
work is exciting because it suggest that, just as you can build muscle
through weight training, brain training can reduce alcohol abuse and
likely a whole host of unhealthy behaviors."
http://forum.psychlinks.ca/addictive-behaviors-substance-use-and-abuse/27175-training-the-brain-to-avoid-temptation.html#post190882