Memories are played of this

Could a new computer game improve your recall? Meg Carter plugs in and finds out
Do you worry about forgetting people’s names or where you put things? If so, help may be at hand. Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? is a computer game from Nintendo that is designed to help people from thirtysomething upwards to boost their mental powers. It goes on sale in the UK next week.

Experts, however, are divided on whether the games giant’s latest move is a serious contribution to brain health or just an attempt to cash in on an ageing population’s fears about “declining” brainpower.

Nintendo’s brain-trainer offers a ten-minute daily workout comprising mental arithmetic, word games and memory tests. It was devised by a Japanese neuroscientist, professor Ryuta Kawashima of Tohoku University, and runs on Nintendo’s DS portable games platform. To play it, you either touch the screen or speak your answers into a microphone. Novices first undertake a brain-challenging assessment that calculates their “brain age” — mine involved identifying the colour of different words written on the screen, the catch being that each word described a colour different to the colour in which they were written. I thought I’d done well — until the game calculated my brain age to be 64. However, Nintendo’s nice public relations lady reassured me this was an above-average opening score and I would be likely to reduce it to below my actual age, 41, through regular training in just a few weeks.

I would be the first to admit that since becoming a mother my memory has got worse — most likely owing to lack of sleep and the growing array of demands that compete for my attention and time. Then there are the memory challenges that contemporary life sets the brain every day: hundreds of messages — e-mails, phone calls, adverts — as well as all the PINs and passwords we’re supposed to memorise. Much of this slips quite easily from my conscious mind. But is this modern overload-induced forgetfulness really a cause for concern? Torkel Klingberg, a professor of neuroscience at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, is one of a growing band of scientists who have turned their attention to memory and how it works. “Many people expect too much of their memory,” he says. “We now live in a society full of distractions — you are never out of reach thanks to texts and mobile phones — and these stresses can cause us to get the impression that our mental performance is worse.”

The picture he paints is one familiar to the former Microsoft executive Linda Stone, who has coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe the state in which most of us now exist — never completely dedicating our concentration to one thing as we attempt to multi-task our way through the day. While this fragments our focus and reduces the likelihood of our committing things clearly to memory, it does not, however, necessarily cause our brains any harm.

What does diminish our ability to remember is ageing. “It is now widely agreed that our working memory peaks during our early twenties before going into gradual decline,” says Andrew Scholey, a professor researching memory at the University of Northumbria. He says memory is understood to comprise a number of different stages: registration, when something is learnt; consolidation, when it is written into the memory; a storage phase, when it become embedded within the brain’s neural networks; and retrieval, when a memory is recovered. But there are also different kinds of memory — implicit memory enables us to learn subconsciously, while procedural memory governs learnt actions that we perform automatically.

“A number of different aspects of memory go wrong as a result of ageing,” Professor Scholey says. “Many people believe that as you age it becomes harder to retrieve memories because the information disappears. In fact, it’s much more likely to be a deficiency in the retrieval process.”

Although memory loss seems inevitable, the process of brain ageing can be delayed, according to Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, the co- author of The Learning Brain (Blackwell Publishing, £16.99). “There is now lots of evidence to suggest that the adult brain becomes more efficient the more you use it,” she says. “The philosophy that we should ‘use it or lose it’ is sound.”

For it to work, however, brain training must be tailored to an individual’s needs. You don’t improve muscle strength by doing ten push-ups every now and then.

Professor Klingberg says: “It must be specific, sustained and become increasingly challenging over time.” He continues: “This is why I have concerns about brain-training games, many of which are simplistic. And I’d question the science behind the concept of having a ‘brain age’.”

If you are worried about your memory, keeping it active is a good place to start. A useful next step, however, is to keep a diary of events to try to understand the possible reasons for any lapses of memory — such as stress or depression, says Clive Evers, the director of information and education at the Alzheimer’s Society. There are different forms of memory loss: we all lose or misplace something at some time or other, he says: the time to worry, however, is not when we lose a regularly used set of keys but if we forget what they’re for.

“I don’t think it’s possible to worry too much about memory,” Evers observes. “Memory, after all, is what makes us each unique. It is fundamental to our personality. People do need to learn more about when forgetfulness might signify something more.”

Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? costs £20 (the DS portable games console is £89.99). It is on sale from June 9 at www.touchgenerations.com ( Courtesy by : http://www.timesonline.co.uk )

Written by GRE Word of The Day Team on September 7th, 2010 with no comments.
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