Is brain training really best way to boost IQ?
London, (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE) By Emine Saner According to her TV advert, after playing Brain Training on the Nintendo DS, Nicole Kidman, 39, has a brain age to match her strangely smooth-skinned face age: 24. The game on the handheld console, which includes memory and reaction time tests, was developed by the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima and has sold 10m copies worldwide, spawning a craze for “brain training” that the New York Times estimated was worth more than $80m in the US alone last year. Newspapers print brain-training puzzles, you can get games on your mobile phone and computer, and there are a number of books. Though they make vague claims to boost brainpower, they are not regulated or subject to clinical trials. So do they work? “There is no evidence these tests do anything to improve cognition,” says Jason Braithwaite, a cognitive and neuro-psychologist at the University of Birmingham. “They are no more worthwhile than playing chess or doing a sudoku puzzle or cr
