Dr. Kawashima and Nintendo were right: brain-training games can actually have a significant positive effect and reduce the effects of aging on our brain. A new scientific study has found that as much as a decade of aging may be offset by our efforts playing them, which is good news if you spent a very long time playing Brain Training.
The key finding was that doing rigorous mental exercises for 30 minutes a day boosts the chemical messenger acetylcholine, which not only carries messages across the brain but improves learning, memory and attention functions. Acetylcholine levels typically deplete with age.
The study monitored 95 people over the age of 65 years for 10 weeks and found a 2.3 percent rise in acetylcholine after doing brain training exercises for 30 minutes a day. As NPR noted in an article about the report, 2.3 percent doesn’t sound enormous, but when you consider there’s usually a decrease of 2.5 percent per decade due to aging, it reframes the discovery. Brain-training games may offset as much as a decade of degradation caused by aging.
There’s an important distinction to make, though. In order to achieve the desired result, you need to play games that are specifically designed to exercise these parts of your brain, such as Nintendo’s Brain Training once was. Candy Crush and solitaire won’t do it; they were what half of the participants played during the test and their acetylcholine levels didn’t change.
Dr Ryuta Kawashima was the neuroscientist Nintendo’s games were developed in collaboration with, and brain age (as the game was titled in Japan) and dementia prevention are specific areas of expertise of his. In other words: this is exactly the sort of thing he was trying to achieve with his Nintendo games.
The Brain Training games first appeared here in 2006. They were made up of many mind-stretching games based around maths, memory recall, and many other things, and you’d play them every day and the game would give a score based on your performance. We gave the original Brain Training 9/10 in our review, and the series would go on to have numerous sequels and even a Switch version released in 2020.
