The app is smartly designed to get more difficult as you get better, so that you always have a challenge in front of you and are never wanting for a way to give your brain a positive workout. Fit Brains Trainer Fit Brains Trainer helps you “enhance your memory, focus, and brain speed” by giving you access to more than 360 games and puzzles.Clevermind is available in the iOS App Store To this end, Clevermind features social, medical, and dietary tools, all presented in an easy-to-read interface that also has a digital assistant who speaks in a Siri-like voice. As any caregiver can tell you, managing someone with Alzheimer’s goes far beyond just giving them mental exercise.
You can try Dakim for free on their website.ĭifferent from many brain-training games in that it’s specially designed for people already suffering from Alzheimer’s, Clevermind goes beyond merely a collection of games. The program gives you access to more than 100 individual brain exercises, all designed to improve attention and concentration - in other words, the very kind of mental tasks that have been demonstrated to play a role in preventing Alzheimer’s and related symptoms. Self-described as a “brain fitness program,” Dakim offers users a set of games and puzzles designed to help you give your brain a comprehensive workout. Lumosity is one of the most popular brain-training games out there, used by more than 60 million people worldwide. Part of what these games are designed to do is strengthen your ability to pay attention to the right things - that is, the things that help you solve the task at hand - while learning to ignore things that don’t help.
Let’s take a look at 8 brain-training games that have earned positive reviews:įree in the iOS Store and Android Play Store, Lumosity offers an ever-expanding set of cognitive and scientific games designed to improve your working memory and stimulate your brain on a daily basis. But, if you’re interested in preventing Alzheimer’s by keeping the neural connections in your brain strong, then games that challenge your working memory and mental agility can be an important part of your plan (along with eating a nutrients-rich diet, getting plenty of sleep, and exercising multiple times per week). If you’re looking to transform yourself into the next Einstein, playing brain-training games may be a fool’s errand.
Why not? Because there’s actually some good evidence to suggest that they can do exactly that. As with all scientific research, there is also a risk of publication bias.However, these same objective scientists have not widely doubted the effectiveness of brain-training games in preventing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. These results are promising, but more research is needed to determine the connection between improved assessment scores and everyday tasks in participants' lives.įuture research should address the risk of inadvertent experimenter bias and the risk of attrition bias in this study, as both the Lumosity and crossword groups had approximately 50% attrition rate.
In it, half of the 4,715 participants who completed the study trained five days per week, for fifteen minutes each day on Lumosity while the other half did online crossword puzzles as an active control.Īfter 10 weeks, Lumosity users improved more than the control group on our assessments of working memory, short term memory, processing speed, problem solving, fluid reasoning, and overall cognitive function. Lumos Labs conducted a randomized study of Lumosity brain training and published the results in a peer-reviewed research journal.