What are brain training games?

If doing weights in the gym is how you keep your body in shape, then brain training games are reps for your mind. They typically take the forms of puzzles and memory games, seemingly innocuous challenges that only serve one purpose: to exercise your brain and keep your cognitive skills sharp.

In gamification terms, brain training video games manipulate the psychological levers of challenge and discovery. The right level of challenge engages the human psyche’s desire to accomplish a difficult task, the completion of which can leave players with a sense of accomplishment. An intriguing puzzle or problem to solve, such as a crossword, can elicit a player’s natural curiosity, and help draw them into the aforementioned challenge.

What are the benefits of brain training games?

As the human mind ages, memory and speed of thought deteriorate at varying speeds. This process of deterioration basically starts at full maturity. Keeping the mind engaged in problems and puzzles are thought to help slow this mental decline. In the same way muscles atrophy and get weak from inactivity, it is widely believed that failing to engage the brain in challenging tasks, such as educational video games incorporating problem-solving and recall, can contribute to comparable effects on the mind.

While experts tend to lean towards the idea that everyone will benefit from some form of brain training, it’s thought where they can have the biggest impact is on older adults. From a logical standpoint, their cognitive functions will have slowed down more because they’ve lived longer lives, but there is also a chance that they’ve retired, or stripped back their responsibilities, typically giving their brain a less challenging regime. However, cognitive functions begin deteriorating as soon as you’re a full-formed adult, so a life-long brain training habit through playing educational games is probably the safest policy.

The ultimate philosophy of brain training as a concept is: use it or lose it. So brain training games can potentially slow down the brain’s natural deterioration, and also be a fun and engaging experience for people playing them.

The popularity of brain training games

Casual games people play for the sake of mentally challenging themselves are not a new phenomenon. The need to be challenged and engaged mentally is hard-wired into us through evolution, it’s how society is where society is, sending rockets into space and sending diseases into the history books through immunisations. However, not everyone has the cognitive capacity to save an endangered species, or map an uncharted corner of the world, much less the opportunity and the resources. Some of the big problems facing humanity have been solved or removed from everyday life, and a lot of the ones left are very high hanging fruit.

Puzzles for the sake of a recreational challenge are thought to have originated in China, with examples dating as far back as 190 years BC, and sprinkled throughout antiquity. The first crossword puzzle, albeit in a different form to how you’d recognise them today, appeared in the New York World in 1913.

Global phenomenons: crossword puzzles and Sudoku

The crossword grew in popularity over the 50 years that followed, with the New York Times calling them “primitive” and “a sinful waste of time” in 1924, to ultimately eat their words and be publishing their own daily crossword puzzle by 1950.

In 1968 the first modern word search puzzle appeared in a weekly Oklahoma magazine called Selenby, and was an instant hit with local teachers who requested extra copies to use in their classes. In 1984 in Japan, a number puzzle game was adapted and renamed Sudoku, and this became a huge hit. Less than two decades later, a former New Zealand judge discovered Sudoku while travelling, and developed a computer programme to automatically generate Sudoku puzzles, making another “brain training” puzzle a world-wide phenomenon.

Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training

The concept or acknowledgement of these sorts of puzzles as “brain training” really came into effect when Nintendo released Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on the Nintendo DS (and later the Nintendo Switch).

First released in 2005, and based on the work of neuroscientist Ryuto Kawashima, the Brain Training games presented players with a series of mini-games designed to stimulate multiple parts of the brain in order to combat cognitive ageing. While Brain Training proved popular with all ages, it proved especially popular with adults. These games showed players their progress through an estimated “brain age” to quantify the positive effects of game play.

Given the popularity of various wordsearch and word puzzle games, and that the first two releases of Brain Training sold a combined 33 million units globally, it’s fair to say that the concept of brain training has been well adopted, if not for the end result, at least for the addictive game-play elements.

How to engage your students in challenges

Brain training games can be used in numerous training and educational settings. Ultimately, the format makes for addictive game-play, and elements of brain training could be incorporated into gamified courses of learning with two major benefits.

Firstly, they keep the player, or student, engaged in the learning process, and secondly, by having pupils engaged in brain training elements, it’s encouraging their neural plasticity as they’re exercising their mind. To build back on the original analogy of brain training games being reps for the mind: Tiger Woods made his millions playing golf, but lifting weights in the gym was a huge component of his success.

Ideas to incorporate brain training games into your classes

You can easily customise the Crossword and Word Search Game to make your own word puzzles on the Drimify app. You could also customise our Memory Cards Game to fit the subject you’re teaching, which as well as encouraging students to exercise their working memory, involves visual scanning and spatial awareness.

One really effective way to gamify your students’ brain training would be to use our Dynamic Path™ platform to create a multi-level brain training experience to engage them over holidays. It would give you access to Drimify’s entire catalogue of games, allowing you to incorporate some quiz-like elements on topics you’d covered over the previous term, but also some puzzle-style games, some of which could relate to subject matter, some of which could just be puzzles for the sake of brain training. A good example of this would be our 2048 game, a maths puzzle where you combine numbered blocks to reach 2,048.

Collaborate with the gamification experts to incorporate brain training games in your teaching

Brain training games as a gamified element of education can do a lot for student motivation, and be really beneficial for their cognitive longevity. Implementing brain training-type puzzles on multi-level learning pathways can be a great way to add variety to a gamified learning experience, and serves the added value element of encouraging your students to exercise their minds by thinking and solving problems.

If you want to discuss incorporating brain training elements into a course of gamified learning, or even put together some brain training games for your students for their own sake, don’t hesitate to contact us for advice.

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