Open question: How to personalize brain training based on age, personality, biology, and more?

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Brain Train­ing Goes to School (Web­MD):

“Kristy Lea was search­ing for a way to help her 5‑year-old son improve his ADHD, and she want­ed to reserve med­ica­tion as a last resort…Increasingly, ther­a­pists, school sys­tems, and par­ents are turn­ing to brain-train­ing games to help chil­dren with learn­ing challenges.

“If you look at the [sci­en­tif­ic research], the results are kind of all over the place. Some stud­ies say they’ve found some­thing sig­nif­i­cant, while oth­er stud­ies say they didn’t find any­thing,” says Michael P. Mil­ham, MD, PhD. He’s the direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Devel­op­ing Brain at the Child Mind Insti­tute in New York.

Results may vary great­ly in part because the suc­cess of the pro­grams can depend on the indi­vid­ual child.

“You want to be care­ful. I’d judge it specif­i­cal­ly by the case,” Mil­ham says. “The thing with ADHD is if you give [kids] a task they can’t do, you could real­ly dis­cour­age the child. If you have the wrong child doing this, you can wind up with some oppo­si­tion or frus­tra­tion. This may be well-suit­ed [to some] but not nec­es­sar­i­ly everyone.”

Age, per­son­al­i­ty dif­fer­ences, and even bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences could impact how much a per­son ben­e­fits from work­ing mem­o­ry training.”

Learn more:

• How learn­ing changes your brain
• Can brain train­ing work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions
• Mind­ful­ness and med­i­ta­tion in Schools