Experts revealed that engaging in activities like reading, chess and knitting could slow cognitive decline and prevent dementia. Activities like reading works out the brain like a muscle.
May 25, 2021 at 11:00 am
It’s an attractive idea: By playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate.
“For every study that finds some evidence, there’s an equal number of papers that find no evidence,” says Bobby Stojanoski, a cognitive neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario (
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Now, in perhaps the biggest real-world test of these programs, Stojanoski and colleagues pitted more than 1,000 people who regularly use brain trainers against around 7,500 people who don’t do the mini brain workouts. There was little difference between how both groups performed on a series of tests of their thinking abilities, suggesting that brain training doesn’t live up to its name, the scientists report in the April