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A brain
exercise designed to help people improve memory also
boosted their problem-solving abilities, scientists said
in a study that may lead to techniques to improve learning
and stave off brain illnesses.
Young
adults who performed the exercise, a complex matching game
of sounds and pictures, improved about twice as much on
problem-solving tests as those who didn’t participate,
University of
Michigan
researchers said in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
Problem-solving ability, sometimes called fluid
intelligence, is one of the hardest brain functions to
build with training, said Susanne Jaeggi, who led the
study. High levels of fluid intelligence are prized
because they are linked to success in the professional
world, she said.
“Until
now, it was thought that this capacity was very fixed and
that the brain didn’t show much change after a certain
age,” she said in a telephone interview. “It now looks as
though it may be possible to boost fluid intelligence in
young adults.”
About 4.5
million Americans have incurable, memory-robbing
Alzheimer’s disease. Companies, including Kyoto-based
Nintendo Co. and San Francisco-based Posit Science Corp.,
sell computer programs and games to help older people and
soon-to-be-elderly baby boomers exercise their thinking
ability. Such activities can help people use it, rather
than lose it, said Andrew Carle, director of the program
in senior housing administration at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Mental
exercise
“Anything
you can do to force your brain to work harder, just like
physical exercise, can make your brain stronger,” said
Carle, who jokingly described his specialty, which
involves working with grandmothers, as “Nana-technology.”
“If
they’ve come across a technique that really challenges and
drives people to push the limits of their cognitive skills
to a new level, that could work.”
Jaeggi and
her coauthor Martin Buschkuehl put 34 graduate students at
the University of Bern, Switzerland, through the demanding
training. The students got two cues simultaneously. One
was a visual pattern, the other a recorded voice saying a
letter of the alphabet.
The
subjects had three seconds to determine if either the
pattern or the letter, or both, matched up with the
second-to-last cue they’d heard. When they performed well,
the bar rose: they had to match the current cue with the
third-last, fourth-last, or fifth-last letter or pattern.
When the subjects stumbled, the matching interval was
decreased.
Memory,
problem-solving
After
eight days to 19 days of training, all of the students
improved their ability to memorize a list of numbers. In
addition, their scores improved by as much as 40 percent
on standardized tests of problem solving that involve
finding the right pattern to finish an incomplete drawing.
On average, the trained students performed twice as well
on problem-solving tests as 35 students who didn’t
participate in the memory exercises, the study said.
This is
one of few examples of skill “transfer,” where training in
one area leads to improvement in another cognitive
ability, Jaeggi said. That proves that the subjects aren’t
getting better at the test simply by practicing it, she
said.
“It’s a
very exciting study,” said Robert Wilson, a Rush
University Medical Center neuropsychologist in Chicago,
who studies brain exercises for older people. “We can
improve people’s skill on a particular task, but most of
the time that doesn’t improve their performance on other
tasks that are important for living in the world. They
seem to have done that here.”
The study
also suggests that one type of training might improve
brain health broadly and efficiently, he said.
“For
cognitive effect to have any practical relevance it has to
transfer to other kinds of skills,” he said. “You can’t
train for each and every kind of cognitive skill; it just
isn’t practical.” (Bloomberg) | 
