Accidentally Awesome Brain Training Fights Long-Term Dementia!

brain exercise dementia abstract rubiks cube

Photo: Luke Jones, Unsplash

Persistence FINALLY Breaks “The Lumosity Curse”. -With Actual Data!:

Ok, so everyone who was ever forced to take music lessons, spit out your retainer and go kiss your parents.

Not only might they have conferred some of Zamfir’s magic of the pan flute upon you.

But they might have just saved your very mind back in middle-school!

And there might also be a certain argument for their video-game generosity, too.

Because not only have some of those games proved helpful for different types of cognitive-boost,

A JHU team just found one very important exception to “The Lumosity Letdown”…

The Short Answer:

Lots of brain-training games came out in the past.
Few of them had long-term benefits supported by studies.
Some of the ones that did were Chess, Musical Instrument Training, and Foreign Lanugages.
Lumosity tried their best, but they found this out the hard way.
But a team of JHU researchers just found some great results across 20 years.
Quite strangely, their versions of Memory & Reasoning games did not help.
But something called “Speed Training” did.
This is a game where you have to remember the locations of two different items on-screen.
Their version was also adaptive and progressive, getting faster & more complex as the player improved.
The Memory & Reasoning games used did not have these two aspects.
But the OG 1980s memory game, “Simon” does! :P
The results showed that for subjects who completed at-least 8 of the 10 initial sessions and then did “boosters” 1 & 3 years later, their incidence of Dementia was 25% lower than those who didn’t play at all.
The game researchers used is called, “Double Decision” and is found on the BrainHQ website.
This test was the first gold-standard trial on Dementia-fighting brain exercises of its length.
Researchers think one of the secrets to its success is something called “Implicit Learning”.
This occurs when learning something recruits many more networks and procedures than more 1-dimensional training does.
Some examples of Implicit Learning are 1) The finer-points of driving a car well, and 2) Musical Instrument Lessons.
Other things like great sleep and regular cardiovascular exercise are also very important for avoiding mental decline.
TheLancet even came out with a list of risks, 45% of which you can influence.
And different types of “brain exercise” were certainly on it!

Read on to find out the details…

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What A Drag It Is, Growing Old!:

One of the things we all want to do, especially here, is to fight-off the ravages of time.

-Especially since few of us have been endowed with the cockroach-level immortality of Keith Richards.

And one of the best places to start that work is on your mind.

But what turns out to be just effort vs. actual results has been elusive and weird when people go out to study it.

A No-BS, Gold-Standard Trial Tests Three Types Of Training:

So in a gold-standard type trial (RCT) JHU researchers decided to see what brain-training tools actually helped people keep their marbles.

They recruited about 2800 people for an unprecedented magnum-opus of 20 years.

All the subjects were 65 or older and from six different geographical regions and had no cognitive problems at the start.

They were split into three main groups outside the control.

1) Memory training
2) Reasoning training
3) Speed training

They got 60-75 minutes of training about twice/week for five weeks.

Those who did at least 8/10 sessions then were recruited to do 10 more hours of training.

These were split equally at about the 1 year & 3 year marks.

Not Every Training-Type Worked. Especially The Obvious Ones:

What came next was amazing.

However, not everyone did well.

The people who didn’t do any better than controls (ie: abstainers) were quite-weirdly, ::drumroll please::

1) People who didn’t do the ~1-year & ~3-year booster sessions
2) People who did the Reasoning training
and even weirder-still
3) People who did the Memory training

-Wait, people who did about 20 hours of lab-grade memory training with an initial set AND THEN boosters didn’t do better than average???

WHAAAAAAT???…

The Accidental Awesome Of Hidden Learning Networks!:

Alright, so there’s some weird stuff going on in the brain-exercise world.

Because not only does Cardio-exercise clean-out your brain and make you grow more new brain cells, right in your memory center,

But learning a foreign language isn’t too shabby for long-term brain-function either.

And perhaps you should spit that retainer out and kiss your momma. Because –learning to play a musical instrument is even better!

So oddly-enough, the type of work that JHU researchers found to produce results had something in it called, “implicit learning”.

And that group reduced their incidence of Dementia by an amazing 25%!

Why Train Just One Pathway When You Can Do At Least Three?:

The researchers noted that Implicit-Learning involves a lot more brain-regions and processes than something that’s purely cognitive.

It works on multiple pathways at once, and has been likened to learning to ride a bike or drive a car.

You’re not just looking around for obstacles and dangers in the environment, you’re encoding multiple procedures at the same time.

Also, the Speed Training game had one helpful quirk. It was adaptive.

So subject would start out slow and find-out where they were working best that day or time, then slowly progress to faster & faster.

Part Of The Voodoo Was Adaptive Speed & Complexity:

-The memory & reasoning training was not structured that way.

The training that did work, called Double Decision on BrainHQ, mostly consisted of finding visual information in two different locations and then matching them at increasing speed and complexity.

You can play the beginner’s version of the game here.

But you do have to do the whole sign-up process to play the real one.

(Btw, the nav is a little weird. It’s under Training > Explore All Exercises > Double Decision.)

The Secret Is Crushing Code Dimensions Like A Nerdy David Goggins:

What’s interesting is the potential connections to language and music.

You go through the routines of memorizing what the symbols mean on a page or a screen.

But then you also go on to begin and repeatedly refine your understanding of what those symbols are supposed to sound like.

Then while you’re doing that, you are supposed to be moving your hands, your fingers, or your mouth and larynx in ways that are supposed to mimic what’s on the page.

The Teacher Dictates “The What”, The Subconscious Encodes “The How”:

When you do that, the teacher doesn’t always tell you the -exact- How.

A lot of times they tell you The What, and then you keep iterating until you get it right by creating your own technique-refinements.

In addition, not only are you often called to memorize huge sets of data and procedures to do either.

Sometimes, you even improvise with a whole new set.

-All while receiving instant millisecond-level feedback about whether you’re doing it right.

The Sad Truth Of, “Use It Or Lose It” Even Holds For Brains:

And weirdly, here is a list of some strangely-relevant Alzheimer’s risks that do echo a little bit.

1) Less education
2) Hearing loss
3) Physical inactivity
4) Alcohol
5) Social isolation
6) Vision loss

The complete list is at the link above.

But the important takeaway there, is that many of those are related to one type of “brain exercise” or another; or its opposite.

The Magic Formula Has Some Of The Obvious, Some Not:

So, even though the study isn’t perfect and has some limitations, it’s still the best one yet.

And may also be a very nerdy way of reinforcing the idea that even video games can help improve long-term cognition.

The other great takeaways are:

1) Brain-strengthening can come from unexpected sources; not just Lumosity and Chess
2) You probably have to keep up the exercise long-term and not just do it once or twice
3) The more systems you engage in a skill, the more implicit learning it will contain
4) The training may have to be adaptive & progressive to really help you

So now get yourself over to BrainHQ and get some exercise done in one of the few “brain gyms” that actually seems to work!

Because another important takeaway is this bonus: Alzheimer’s & Dementia are diagnosed at a certain age,

But they -START- earlier. So the sooner you start exercising your brain in proven ways, the better.

Be well!