The Science Behind 'Brain Training' | Hacker News Reader

The Science Behind 'Brain Training'

theatlantic.com

36 pointstokenadult10 comments

I work for a company that combines wearable technology with iOS brain training games (with neurofeedback and cognitive techniques) and which has yielded similar results in high performance athletics. Like Cogmed, clinical trials will take years to validate - but our early stage adopters, organizations like Red Bull and sports franchises like the Seattle Seahawks, continue to see meaningful results and are very upbeat.

http://www.senselabs.com

Does your Chief Science Officer really have a PhD from Capella University?

What does it matter?

according to his linkedin, he has 2 PhDs from Capella, first in Psychology, then a respecialization in Sports Psychology

In this same vein, people here might be interested in Lumosity[0]. I've been using it for a few months, on and off (I'm terrible about not doing it consistently each day), and it's interesting enough that I'd probably recommend at least trying it to most anyone.

It's hard to say whether I'm just getting better at the games themselves through repetition, rather than improving the underlying skills necessary to play them, but I definitely have improved significantly over time.

[0] http://lumosity.com

I did Lumosity for some time. It's quite evident you get better at some of the games through learning the game mechanics and optimizing around that. It's not clear why that would necessarily transfer to general cognitive abilities. I had some pretty good scores so it made me feel smarter ;-) (I wonder if everyone has good scores?)

For a software developer, wouldn't it make more sense to practice something closer to home? Learn a new programming language? Solve some programming problem? You'd think that if your cognitive abilities can improve through challenge (the "brain as a muscle theory") this would stimulate that and it would almost certainly also be a benefit because it is more specific (so even if your overall cognitive abilities don't improve your programming skills almost certainly would).

I used Lumosity for about a year. I did it fairly consistently about every other day and my wife did it with me about every third day.

Personally, I thought it helped. I'm obviously a very biased source and a good number of biases come into play if I try to evaluate it's effectiveness on me. But for what it's worth, after doing it consistently I felt like I was a little more mentally alert in areas of life that I had been weaker. And so was my wife. Without going into the details, I think we both boosted some of our weak points a little.

If nothing else it was a fun way to warm up my brain in the morning.

I have a little anecdote there... My wife started playing some of the games on my account and that really impacted my engagement because the scores were now a mix of both of us. Just shows the importance of gamification and how it can be messed with...

I expect that the fancied-up arithmetic games do transfer to non-fancied-up arithmetic pretty well. Many of the others I'm more skeptical of them actually transferring to anything useful.

Dual-N-Back is a simple, brutal way to stress your working memory, and there are a lot of studies behind it.

http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com