What's a decoder? The brain game app turns your ability to focus, according to a new research

Tell me if it sounds familiar: you go home after a long day of work and you take out your phone to try to distract you from children crying on the train or screaming pbadengers against the bus driver. But after going through your social networks for a while, you start wondering if you should use your time a bit more, you know, wisely. If you're on your phone, but you're tired of scrolling through social media 24/7, the Decoder puzzle game is an app that helps you focus, and who knows – that might be a lot more rewarding flirt a bit with your fun games rather than get lost in another very toxic Twitter thread.

Listen, I know that there are a multitude of puzzles games on the market. But here's why this one could legitimately be worth your time: a team of researchers from Cambridge University developed the Decoder game app – which they described in their research as "a new game for targeted cognitive training of sustained visual attention on iPad "- to check if an application in general could really train a person's brain to better focus on their daily tasks. The researchers conducted a study to verify it, which was published in the newspaper The boundaries of behavioral science. As part of the study, researchers asked 75 adults between the ages of 18 and 30 to play Decoder, play bingo, or continue their regular schedule over a four-week period.

According to the study, the participants to whom the games were badigned played for a total of eight hours throughout the duration of the study. After performing cognitive tests on the participants (think, for example, of memory tests that challenge your ability to stay alert for long periods of time), the researchers found that only the group that played Decoder had visual attention improved and sustained significantly. In other words, Decoder seems to work well, at least according to science.

So, how does Decoder work, exactly? The game is designed to work by helping you focus on a task – identifying sequences of numbers – instead of planning your grocery list or thinking of the one million emails you need to write. Keeping your mind engaged in the current game, the idea is that you give yourself an easy way to refocus yourself so that you make To return to work or school, you can really keep your mind on what you are doing.

It seems that more research is needed to evaluate Decoder, but lead researcher Barbara Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, told CNN that she hoped the game could be used to different ways in the future. "We hope the game will benefit patients with attention deficit, including those with ADHD or traumatic brain injury," she told reporters.

If you want to test the game yourself, you can download it for free from the App Store via its host application, Peak. In addition to Decoder, you can try another 45 brain building games, and the app will measure your progress over time so you can determine if it's actually effective for your mind.