*Jika saja mereka belajar bagaimana otak bekerja dan bagaimana manusia yang sebenarnya menurut petunjuk Al-Quran, Barangkali mereka tidak se bodoh ini... Setidaknya, tidak baru tahu sekarang...*
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/186226.php Computerized Brain Trainers Don't Boost Brain Power Say Researchers Main Category: Neurology / Neuroscience<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/sections/neurology/> Also Included In: Seniors / Aging<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/sections/seniors/> ; Psychology / Psychiatry<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/sections/psychology-psychiatry/> Article Date: 21 Apr 2010 - 8:00 PDT ------------------------------ A large UK study concluded that brain-training computer games don't boost brain power: they may train people to get better at the games themselves, but this improvement is not transferred to other cognitive tasks, said the researchers. The study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the BBC Lab UK website, was published online in *Nature* on 20 April and will be the topic of the BBC 1 television programme *Bang Goes the Theory* at 9pm tonight, Wednesday. The researchers invited viewers of the BBC 1 programme to take part in the trial, where they completed a series of online exercises or brain workouts for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, for six weeks. 11,430 volunteers aged from 18 to 60 completed the study, as members of various groups. One group completed online tasks that focused on reasoning, planning and problem solving games, a second group focused on short-term memory, attention, visuospatial ability and maths, while a third group (the controls), were just asked to use the Internet to research answers to various obscure questions. The researchers found that while the participants got better at doing their designated tasks, tests of general cognitive ability showed no change in their memory, reasoning and learning skills. "There were absolutely no transfer effects," lead author Dr Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, told Nature News. "I think the expectation that practising a broad range of cognitive tasks to get yourself smarter is completely unsupported," he added. However, some experts did not share his confidence in the results. Dr Peter Snyder, a neurologist from Brown University's Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, who studies ageing, said he thought the study was flawed, because it did not include older adults, the group targeted by many of the commercial brain workout programs. Snyder said if they had included an older group, they would probably have had a lower mean starting score before the trial, and more variability in performance, which would have left more room for improvement from the training. "You may have more of an ability to see an effect if you're not trying to create a supernormal effect in a healthy person," he told Nature News. Dr David Moore, director of the MRC Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham, UK, who started the company MindWeavers that sells MindFit, a brain workout program, said a problem with the study was that the volunteers were "self-selected" and would thus already have a natural tendency to play this sort of game. Snyder and Moore also said the trial was too short: four hours of training over six weeks is not enough, for instance it is less than the intensity and duration of brain training programs for people who have had strokes<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/7624.php> . But Owen said other studies have also used six-week training periods, and although the average number of sessions the volunteers completed was 24, some only did two while others completed several hundred, and there was no difference in performance between the extremes. However, he did agree these findings don't apply to young children and older adults, since they did not study them and perhaps more research should be done to see if such games help older people maintain their cognitive faculties, although the evidence was not strong. Co-author Professor Clive Ballard of the Alzheimer's Society told the BBC that: "This evidence could change the way we look at brain training games and shows staying active by taking a walk for example is a better use of our time." A spokeswoman for Nintendo, who have sold 35 million copies of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training game told the press they did not claim the game was scientifically proven to improve cognitive function, reported Times Online. *"Putting brain training to the test."* Adrian M. Owen, Adam Hampshire, Jessica A. Grahn, Robert Stenton, Said Dajani, Alistair S. Burns, Robert J. Howard and Clive G Ballard. *Nature*<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/pdf/nature09042.pdf>, Published online 20 April 2010 (PDF). DOI:10.1038/nature09042 Sources: BBC, Nature News, TImes Online. Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
