With dementia cases around the world expected to triple by 2050, scientists are scrambling to find solutions which all of us can use to keep our brains functional and healthier for longer.
But what if the solution to delaying the onset of cognitive decline was as simple as playing a game? Puzzles such as sudokus have now been widely shown not to protect against cognitive decline. But new types of brain training games are increasingly being explored by teams of neuroscientists in the UK and around the world.
“There’s reasonable evidence that certain games can improve cognitive skills,” says Perminder Sachdev, professor of neuropsychiatry at UNSW Sydney. “This has been shown particularly for processing speed, attention and task switching.”
The good news is the games with good evidence are often free to play online. These are the types that are showing the most promise for fighting off cognitive decline.
Processing speed games
Processing speed – how quickly your brain is able to take in, interpret and respond to information – is one of the cognitive factors most affected by ageing.
“That’s where we see the biggest changes,” says Michael Hornberger, professor of applied dementia research at the University of Southampton and author of Tangled Up: The History and Science of Alzheimer’s Disease.“But we think you can train people to keep their processing speed up, and in turn, that [has] an effect across loads of different aspects of cognition.”
In one US trial, researchers put 2,802 people over the age of 65 through rigorous training sessions with games aimed at honing either memory, reasoning or processing speed, all designed by a health tech company called Posit Science.
The participants were then tracked for the next two decades, and results showed those who trained with a processing speed game were 25 per cent less likely to develop dementia.
Below, you can try a few of Posit Science’s brain training games for yourself.
Hawk Eye:
The aim of this game is to improve visual precision, or your brain’s ability to perceive something quickly and accurately so that you can bring it to the front of your mind with more alacrity. This enables you to recall details of a TV program you watched last week, for example.
Hawk Eye challenges your visual precision by asking players to locate a target bird among a flock in your peripheral vision, even though the birds only appear on screen for a very short time.
The average score in this game, according to Posit Science, is 1064 milliseconds. If you achieve 300 milliseconds or lower you’re in the top 15 per cent of all people who play these games. But cognitive performance is dynamic and modifiable throughout the lifespan, so don’t pay too much attention. Posit Science says: “Consider your score a snapshot of current function, or a starting point for improvement and a reminder to engage in brain health activities.”
Visual Sweeps
To see, your brain needs to quickly recognise subtle aspects of visual information and quickly interpret them, something known as visual acuity. This game is intended to train this skill through viewing a pair of dark bars that are moving inward or outward, and identifying whether they are contracting or expanding. The average score in this game, according to Posit Science, is 170 milliseconds. If you achieve 50 milliseconds or lower you’re in the top 15 per cent of all people who play these games.
According to Hornberger, one of the key aspects of these kinds of games is that the task is continually being adapted to make it slightly more difficult. “That’s very important,” he says. “You don’t want the task to be too easy or too hard – you want your brain to keep being challenged.”
Attention games
Some researchers have also identified potential benefits from games that work on various aspects of our attention span, an aspect of our cognition that has become progressively strained in recent decades due to the advent of smartphones and social media algorithms that trap our minds into infinite scrolling.
Target Tracker
This game hones your visual attention, a facet of cognition that we need to keep track of other cars or pedestrians while driving, for example. The game requires you to keep an eye on a few target objects (bubbles, jellyfish or puffer fish) as they appear and move around the screen, and once again, the challenge becomes progressively harder. The average score in this game, according to Posit Science, is three items. If you achieve four items you’re in the top 15 per cent of all people who play these games.
Researchers have found that maintaining attention and concentration in mid to later life is a key aspect of keeping your brain healthy, with studies showing that attention deficits are an early marker of neurodegeneration. With this in mind, University of Cambridge neuroscientists have also been developing their own game called Decoder, available on a free app, which is now being commercialised by app developer Peak, and is specifically aimed at helping users train these cognitive skills.
Strategy games
Another useful way of delaying brain ageing is to take up a complex strategy game, for example board games like chess and Go, or card games like bridge and poker.
In 2023, a major study that tracked more than 10,000 older Australians over the course of a decade concluded that these kinds of strategy games could reduce dementia risk by nine per cent. Another more recent study found that playing chess and Go can improve semantic fluency – the ability to quickly retrieve words from your memory – in people over the age of 55 who already have mild cognitive impairment.
According to neurologist Ronald Petersen, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, this is partially because such games are an effective way of honing a variety of aspects of cognitive thinking, from memory to reasoning.
Crucially, unlike simpler activities such as doing a jigsaw puzzle, or crossword, the ever-shifting nature of strategy games means that you’re constantly being required to apply skills like logic and pattern recognition to tackle different situations. Scrabble is also a good example of a board game which not only requires memory but a certain degree of strategic thinking as well.
This means that rather than simply learning to get better at a particular task – something which neuroscientists call “near transfer” – your brain is being pushed to develop much more valuable “far transfer” skills, the ability to apply knowledge to new situations.
“You know the underlying rules of the game, but what’s going to happen on this particular occasion will be different, so you have to use some flexibility,” says Petersen. “And cognitive flexibility is one of the most important things to try and hold onto.”
Exercise video games
In November 2006, the Nintendo Wii was released, an enormously popular home video console that enabled people to recreate the motions of playing sports like tennis, boxing, bowling, golf or baseball, from the comfort of their living room.
It launched the field of “exergaming”, which now encompasses everything from dance games to virtual cycling through bikes and connected screens. Now, some compelling new evidence from neuroscientists in Switzerland, who carried out a clinical trial of 30 people with an average of 72, all of whom had mild cognitive impairment, suggests that this could have real benefits for brain health. For three months, they were required to do at least 24 minutes of exergaming, five times a week, and by the end of the study, the results showed an apparent reversal of brain atrophy, the age-related shrinkage of brain regions which causes cognitive decline.
You could also get some of these benefits through playing any kind of sport. Exergaming has the advantage of honing your reactions in your own home, although Hornberger advises that it’s important to keep your physical condition in mind, and avoid games which might prompt you to trip and fall, especially if you’re more vulnerable to falling.
All in all, we’re increasingly learning that there’s much we can all do to help avoid cognitive decline, and making time to play more games might just be the key.