According to a recent study published in JAMDA, playing online games that tests the reasoning and memory skills - brain training - could have essential advantages for older people in their day to day lives.
Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London have demonstrated that an online brain training scheme can not only boost memory and reasoning skills - but also how well older people execute daily tasks such as cooking , shopping, navigating public transport and managing personal finances.
As stated in The Medical News Today, previous studies has revealed some potential for brain drills in enhancing memory, while these small-scale researches have been incomplete. This current research, which is subsidized by the Alzheimer's Society, is the biggest randomized control trial to date of an online brain training scheme. Including almost 7,000 adults aged over 50, it is also the first to assess the effect of computerized brain training on how well people can execute their daily activities.
The brain training package consisted of three reasoning activities, such as balancing weights on a see-saw, and three problem-solving tasks, such as positioning numbered bricks in numerical order. Study participants (originally inducted from the general populace through the collaboration between the BBC, Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer's Society) were cheered to play the game for 10 minutes at a time, as frequent as they desired. Before beginning the experiment and again after six weeks, three months and six months, the participants finished a sequence of cognitive tests, including scopes of grammatical memory and reasoning. Those over 60 were also evaluated on a test of daily living (e.g. using the telephone, doing the shopping or navigating public transport).
After six months, brain exercise led to important developments in scores on the test of day to day living in people over 60, and important progress in reasoning and verbal knowledge in those over 50 as to those who didn't play the reasoning and problem solving games. Playing the brain exercise games five times a week was most productive in achieving these developments
Although some fail in memory and thinking skills, this is a normal part of healthy ageing; more severe deterioration can be a forerunner to dementia, a case which is characterized by the continous loss of ability and function. Earlier researches has proved that people who have intricate occupations or participate in cognitively challenging activities such as puzzles, crosswords and learning new skills throughout life likely to have reduced chances of dementia.
