Mind games

This week let me begin with a slightly awkward confession. Last weekend I spent around two and a half hours giving a written entrance examination at the Birkbeck College here in London.

(If you’re wondering where you’ve heard that name before, you are probably a frequent listener of Melvyn Bragg’s excellent In Our Time radio show and podcast. In Bragg’s weekly show, he assembles a cast of scholars and experts to discuss topics of historical and contemporary relevance. Recent topics have included the Taipin Rebellion in China, and the Neutrino. Gripping stuff. Often his experts are faculty at Birkbeck.)

The ‘e’ quotient: There are several great online mind games available.

After the exam anyone who ranked in the top 2% of the population would be invited to join Mensa, a worldwide organization of approximately 100,000 high IQ individuals.

Also read | Sidin Vadukut’s earlier articles

As you might expect, the organization comes in for a lot of derision online and in the media. People think it is elitist, snobbish and flawed. Many dismiss the idea of IQ tests as fundamentally meaningless.

I ended up going for the test because of two reasons. First of all, I admit sheepishly that I like these kinds of things. The tests are essentially puzzles involving math and pattern recognition (you have no right to laugh at me if you do Sudoku puzzles). What a great way to spend a weekend afternoon that I would have otherwise spent tweeting. And second, I had somehow stumbled across the addictive Mensa iPhone app.

The puzzle/brainteaser genre of gaming has taken off stupendously over the last few years. I reckon that the tipping point was a series of Nintendo DS games called Brain Age that were first launched in Japan in May 2005. The game was developed in association with a Japanese neuroscientist called Ryuta Kawashima, and claimed, though not overtly with any scientific proof, that playing the game keeps the brain active and “young”.

Improve You Health – Brain Age Mythology Compared to What Really ...

Copyright (c) 2008 SharpBrains

Many people have been asking us recently about whether we all have a “Brain Age” and how we can reduce our “brain ages”. This concept is a myth, fueled by the (very fun) Nintendo game and a recent PBS campaign promoting a program produced by Posit Science.

The concept of having a “brain age” is, itself, profoundly unscientific, despite the radio ads for the PBS program titled Brain Fitness Program, where listeners of all ages get the impression (as many friends and colleagues have reported) that, should they buy the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program, they can expect their brains “rejuvenated” by 10 years. This, I hear often, must be true, coming from PBS.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. And it isn’t because the claim is founded on the same faulty premise of having a “brain age”.

What is going on?

First, the good news. Today we know today that the brain retains lifelong plasticity (the ability to change itself through experience). Aging does not mean automatic decline.

Furthermore, we know that a variety of lifestyle factors, including physical and mental exercise, can influence how our mental abilities evolve as we age. We can delay or slow down age-related decline. Not only that, we can improve our abilities, and a number of computer-based programs have shown how they can help specific groups of people train and enhance specific cognitive skills.

Now, what is important to recognize is that there is not one overall “brain age”. We can view our brain functions or cognitive abilities as a variety of skills, some more perception-related, some more memory-related, some more language-related, some more visual, some more abstract-thinking and planning oriented. All science-based brain fitness products in the market today target specific cognitive skills. The research that has been published shows how specific brain functions can be improved. But there is no general “brain age” that can be measured or trained in a meaningful way.

Let’s analyze the PBS Posit Science-related message: you can rejuvenate your brain by 10 years. What would this mean, were it to be true? perhaps that ALL cognitive abilities would go back to where they were 10 years before. and that this would happen for individuals of all ages: in our 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and so on. It would also mean that, given that rejuvenated “brain age”, our risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms would be adjusted to reflect our “new” brain age. And that the evolution of our cognitive abilities over the rest of our lives would reflect our new-found “brain age”.

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