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Can Gaming Slow Mental Decline in the Elderly?
By ANITA HAMILTON Anita Hamilton – Sat Jul 11, 1:20 am ET
If you or your parents are of a certain age, then you may understand the unique terror of suddenly drawing a blank – that unexpected moment when you can’t remember the name of a lifelong friend or what you had for lunch that day. You wonder, anxiously, “Have I stepped down the long, slow, inexorable road to losing my mind?”

There is, of course, no cure for memory loss, and no preventive vaccine. Yet a rapidly growing body of evidence suggests that certain behaviors may reliably slow the effects of age-related cognitive decline. Chief among them: eating right, exercising and engaging in social activity and mentally challenging tasks.

It’s that last item that most interests psychologists Anne McLaughlin and Jason Allaire at North Carolina State University. The duo are part of a team that was just awarded $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation to fund a four-year study of cognitive decline in the elderly – specifically, whether playing certain video games might help slow the effects of aging. The theory is that the strategy, memory and problem-solving skills necessary for mastering certain games may translate into benefits in the real world, beyond a glowing screen computer screen.

While funding is flowing quickly to new studies similar to McLaughlin and Allaire’s – the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, has pledged $8.5 million to study the impact of video games on everything from Alzheimer’s disease to driving skills – there is little existing evidence that gaming, which is widely dismissed as an elaborate form of mind rot, really holds any potential to slow the effects of aging. “I think it is silly for someone to run out and buy a game with the hope that it is going to help them age better. There is no proof that it is going to be effective,” says Columbia University neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern, who specializes in cognition in older adults and is conducting a video game study of his own. “We know that cognitive stimulation is good but we don’t know what type or the amount.”

The claims made by many brain-boosting websites and digital games, however, would have you believing otherwise. HAPPYneuron, a $100 Web-based brain-training site entices visitors to “give the gift of brain fitness” and claims that its users saw “16% + improvement” through exercises such as learning to associate a bird’s song with its species and shooting basketballs through virtual hoops. Nintendo’s bestselling Brain Age game promises to “give your brain the workout it needs” through exercises like math problems and playing rock, paper, scissors on the handheld DS.