Over the years we have seen a tremendous increase in life spend with the help of medication and diet. As the gaining population increasing, maintaining good health in older days is becoming a huge problem. For physical needs, doctors and researchers recommend constant physical exercises to keep the body running and maintaining stamina. However, with an increase in cases of cognitive decline in later age people are more concern about ways to avoid this issue. Cognitive disorders like amnesia, dementia, and Alzheimer's are progressive and in most cases, the reason remains unknown. To avoid this problem people, feel the urge to train their minds because they think this will be helpful for them, keep their mind active and just like physical training mental training will also be helpful but is there any evidence?
Researches done by multiple sources (as mentioned by Wired) explain that no relationship has yet been found between playing mind training games and developing cognitive decline issue in later life. Most of the games take lead because they are not kept in the gaming sections. The reason is that the video gaming industry is quite competitive and there are so many different games that finding a mind training game becomes quite difficult. These games are kept in fitness, health or education section so, they become relatively easier to search.
To understand that even though these games have not shown any connection between cognitive decline disorders and mind training, why most people are still playing them. Researchers tried to ask this question right from the users. Most of the players, playing these games explain that they like to compete with other people playing the same game and see the scores and how well they are doing. It’s more like a way of boosting confidence than actually working for the betterment of mental health in older age. Considering that mind training games have more than 100 million downloads and most of the users are even going premium, exploring more features, passing a difficult phase just for the confidence boost is quite shocking.
In the year 2018, gamers have spent over 1.9 billion dollars on mind games and training apps, these apps include Lumosity, Peak and Elevate and since then it has only increased. In the year 2012, it reached up to 475 million dollars making it a big deal. Experts say that people are now finding intellect and intelligence more appealing as compared to material things. Most people even associate intelligence with becoming billionaires which is the reason parents of the billionaires like Elon Musk are writing books about raising rich kids and most of the people in their profiles and Bios add “Sapiosexual” as a way of expressing their love towards the intellect. Most of the mind training games try to market themselves with researchers that are done by their own teams just to support the games. Although these researchers are not totally fake they are done in a controlled environment on just a few people and there is no way to prove that a test conducted on a small and very limited sample will work effectively for all.
Read next: How to switch off your work brain after hours (infographic)
Researches done by multiple sources (as mentioned by Wired) explain that no relationship has yet been found between playing mind training games and developing cognitive decline issue in later life. Most of the games take lead because they are not kept in the gaming sections. The reason is that the video gaming industry is quite competitive and there are so many different games that finding a mind training game becomes quite difficult. These games are kept in fitness, health or education section so, they become relatively easier to search.
To understand that even though these games have not shown any connection between cognitive decline disorders and mind training, why most people are still playing them. Researchers tried to ask this question right from the users. Most of the players, playing these games explain that they like to compete with other people playing the same game and see the scores and how well they are doing. It’s more like a way of boosting confidence than actually working for the betterment of mental health in older age. Considering that mind training games have more than 100 million downloads and most of the users are even going premium, exploring more features, passing a difficult phase just for the confidence boost is quite shocking.
In the year 2018, gamers have spent over 1.9 billion dollars on mind games and training apps, these apps include Lumosity, Peak and Elevate and since then it has only increased. In the year 2012, it reached up to 475 million dollars making it a big deal. Experts say that people are now finding intellect and intelligence more appealing as compared to material things. Most people even associate intelligence with becoming billionaires which is the reason parents of the billionaires like Elon Musk are writing books about raising rich kids and most of the people in their profiles and Bios add “Sapiosexual” as a way of expressing their love towards the intellect. Most of the mind training games try to market themselves with researchers that are done by their own teams just to support the games. Although these researchers are not totally fake they are done in a controlled environment on just a few people and there is no way to prove that a test conducted on a small and very limited sample will work effectively for all.
Read next: How to switch off your work brain after hours (infographic)
