How This Science Based Brain Training App Can Increase Your Concentration



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A A new study has scientifically proven that the new brain training game helped to improve the concentration of players. "Decoder", which began to be used on smartphones on Sunday, breaks with other applications in the market that claim to boost brain power but have questionable value on the real world.

"We all came home from work thinking that we were busy all day, but we did not know what we really did," said Barbara Sahakian, a member of the team that helped develop the game. Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. said in a statement. "Most of us spend our time answering emails, looking at text messages, looking for social media, trying to do several things at once. But instead of doing a lot of things, we sometimes struggle to carry out a task and reach our goal of the day. Then we go home and, even there, we have trouble to "turn off" and read a book or watch TV without taking our smartphones. For complex tasks, we must enter the "flow" and stay focused. "

The game involves asking players to watch a series of numbers from two to nine flashing one at a time, at a speed of 100 digits per minute. For five minutes, players must press a button when they begin to see a sequence emerge. The researchers looked at 75 adults divided into three groups, asking two of the groups to play the game or play bingo for eight sessions of one hour each, for a month, the third group doing nothing. The team tested the participants before and after the month and found that their results on CANTAB's visual information rapid processing test were superior to those of the Bingo group and the no play groups. The resulting paper, entitled "Attention improvements following a cognitive training with the new game" Decoder "on an iPad", was published in the newspaper Borders in behavioral neuroscience Monday.

The game is a marked change compared to many solutions on the market, which claim to stimulate the brain, but have little scientific support. Researcher Hilda Bastian said in July 2016 that a study claiming that brain training halved dementia did not properly randomize participants. Lumosity, who was fined $ 2 million by the Federal Trade Commission for its advertising claims, has certainly exaggerated.

"Many brain training applications on the market are not supported by rigorous scientific evidence," said George Savulich of the Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience and Clinical University. "Our evidence-based game is developed interactively and the game developer, Tom Piercy, makes sure it's attractive and fun to play. The level of difficulty is adapted to each player and the participants appreciate the challenge of cognitive training. "

The team included the game in the "Peak Brain Training" app, now available free of charge for iOS. Although the app is also available on Android, the game "Decoder" will not arrive until later in the year.

Read the paper summary below:

Work and studies are increasingly based on the use of technologies that force people to quickly move attention between emails, texts and tasks. This has led healthy people to have problems with attention and concentration and difficulties in getting into the "flow", which hinders the achievement of goals and completion of tasks. Perhaps because of this, the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the prescriptions of drugs such as Methylphenidate are increasingly being diagnosed. In addition to ADHD, attention is affected by other neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and traumatic brain injury. Based on neuropsychological and neuro-pictorial evidence, we developed Decoder, a new targeted cognitive training game for sustained visual attention on an iPad. We aimed to study the effects of cognitive training in 75 healthy young adults randomly badigned to cognitive training (8 hours of play with Decoder over 4 weeks, n = 25), Active Control (8 hours of play with 4-week bingo, n = 25) or pbadive control (continued activities of daily living, n = 25) group. The results showed that cognitive training with Decoder was superior to both control groups in terms of increased target sensitivity (A ') at the Cambridge Neuropsychological Treatment Test (CANTAB RVP), indicating a significant improvement in sustained visual attention. Decoder users also performed significantly better in the decision-making test (TMT) than those in Bingo. Significant differences in visual badog scales were also found between the two game groups, so Decoder achieved higher scores of pleasure, task-related motivation, and alertness during all hours of play. Data suggest that cognitive training with Decoder is an effective non-pharmacological method for increasing attention in healthy young adults, which could be extended to clinical populations in which attention problems persist.

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