BBC brain training study apparently retracts previous overgeneralized claim that “brain training doesn’t work”

Online brain train­ing ‘helps old­er adults with every­day tasks’ (BBC): “Near­ly 7,000 peo­ple aged 50 and over signed up for the six-month exper­i­ment, launched by BBC TV’s Bang Goes The Theory…Some of the vol­un­teers were encour­aged to play online brain train­ing games for 10 min­utes at a time, as often as they wished. The others —…

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To reach your cognitive potential across the whole lifespan, augment healthy lifestyle with brain training

Can You Get Smarter? (The New York Times): “A few years back, a joint study by BBC and Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­sci­en­tists put brain train­ing to the test…There was, how­ev­er a glim­mer of hope for sub­jects age 60 and above…Unlike the younger par­tic­i­pants, old­er sub­jects showed a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in ver­bal reasoning

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Can brain training work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions

In a mod­ern soci­ety we are con­front­ed with a wide range of increas­ing­ly abstract and inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems. Suc­cess­ful­ly deal­ing with such an envi­ron­ment requires a high­ly fit brain, capa­ble of adapt­ing to new sit­u­a­tions and chal­lenges through­out life. Con­se­quent­ly, we expect cross-train­ing the brain to soon become as main­stream as cross-train­ing the body is today,…

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Another victim of the BBC/Nature “brain training” experiment

Have you read the cov­er sto­ry of the New Sci­en­tist this week: Men­tal mus­cle: six ways to boost your brain? The arti­cle, which includes good infor­ma­tion on brain food, the val­ue of med­i­ta­tion, etc., starts by say­ing that: “Brain train­ing does­n’t work, but there are lots of oth­er ways to give your grey mat­ter a…

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BBC “Brain Training” Experiment: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

You may already have read the hun­dreds of media arti­cles today titled “brain train­ing does­n’t work” and sim­i­lar, based on the BBC “Brain Test Britain” exper­i­ment. Once more, claims seem to go beyond the sci­ence back­ing them up … except that in this case it is the researchers, not the devel­op­ers, who are respon­si­ble. Let’s…

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