Playing The Brain Game

In the latest in a series of features, Dr Pauline Balac a senior biology lecturer in the Oldham campus’s School of Applied Sciences, reveals some of the latest research into the brain

Are you a thinker or a creator?

Did you get any brain-training games for Christmas? If so, have you noticed any improvement in your thought processes?

Various versions of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on Nintendo DS were among the top five best selling video games of 2008. They are marketed as lowering your ‘brain age’. There are also a whole lot of other computer software, mobile phone games and puzzle books that claim to boost your brain power. Do they really work though?

The largest part of our brain is the cerebrum, which is divided into two parts — the right and left halves.

Each has a thin outer shell of grey matter, made up of densely packed nerve-cell bodies. This covers a thick central core of white matter, made up of fatty nerve fibres called axons.

The grey matter is like numerous computer processors and the white matter the wires connecting them.

The two halves are joined by a thick band of about 300 million nerve axons. There are nerve-cell connections called synapses within the grey matter and these process information.

The grey matter is involved in sophisticated mental events such as thinking, memory, decision making and creativity.

Distinct activities go on in particular lobes of the grey matter. There are four major lobes in each half, each with a specific role – seeing, hearing, feeling and speaking/thinking.

The left half is best at logical, analytical and verbal tasks such as maths, language and philosophy. The right half is best at non language skills such as spatial perception, artistic, musical and creative talents.

The two halves generally share information and work together. In many people however, the skills associated with just one half seem to be much more strongly developed.

Thus people with a dominant right half are ‘thinkers’ and those with a dominant left half are ‘creators’.

The brain can change or be remodelled in response to the demands placed on it. This is greatest in children but is still true in adults.

New nerve pathways develop (not new nerves, but the connections between existing nerves) as a result of alterations in the shape of dendrites, the projections from the nerve cell body.

This allows new synapses to be formed between other nerve cells. It seems likely that brain function reaches its peak between the ages of 40 to 60, although the actual speed of brain working may peak at age 40.

Memory is the storage of knowledge for later recall. Learning and memory are how we adapt our behaviour to particular situations.

The two stages of memory are short term, lasting from second to hours, and long term, lasting from days to years. Short term memory involves transient changes to existing nerve synapses. Long term memory involves the formation of new, permanent nerve synapses.

There is no single memory centre in the brain. Instead the memory cells are widely distributed. The major site of working memory however is the prefrontal cortex.

This area acts as a temporary storage site, but also carries out problem solving and organising abilities. How intelligent a person is may be determined by the capacity of their working memory temporarily to hold and relate information.

This can be likened to a computer which has a greater amount of dynamic random access memory or DRAM.

Psychologists at the University of Michigan last year found that training working memory did improve the specific tasks that were being practised by people.

However it also improved their fluid intelligence, which is the ability to perform well at unseen tasks. The more time that was spent on training a person’s working memory, the more improvement was found in their fluid intelligence.

Therefore the answer to “does brain-training really work?” seems to be yes.

It appears that the brain is like a muscle, you have to use it or lose it! Puzzles, such as crosswords or Sudoku, can be as effective as more expensive video games.

The real trick though is to make your brain work in ways that it is not used to.

Achieving that stimulus can be as simple as starting a new job or learning to play a musical instrument.