Old Dogs and New Tricks

“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

It could turn out that Holmes was even more brilliant than we thought. The next big thing in brain health may be, yep, video games. Coming soon after the research showing that video games may make better surgeons (link), this is yet another feather in my brother’s cap. As a kid, he had to be dragged from the arcade (or, as happened at least once, abandoned there to find his own way home). Not that just any old video game is supposed to beef up your brain power, but the fact that some of them might is exciting enough for anyone who begged their parents for a quarter to play pac man.

The new brain-healthy games are hitting an aging population worried less and less about looking hot, and more about staying sharp. Maybe we’ll end up seeing fewer infomercials for the thighmaster and more for the hippocampus-master.

Not that this is a bad thing. The concern is valid, and some of the products actually may help. I don’t know if they’ll help more than physical exercise, reading, and cross-word puzzles, but it’s not a bad thing to get people thinking about brain health.

Seed magazine’s Jonah Lehrer reports on a couple of new games for your brain (link to Seed on the right of the main page, but the article is only in the printed version). One of the games, Nintendo’s Brain Age, apparently pretends to be sort of sciency, but in the fine print admits that it’s all just for fun. No research, no proven results. It’s just sort of a game, and sort of a lame one. I’m paraphrasing Lehrer here.

On the other hand, PositScience may have something going. At least they’re doing real research and releasing the results. Seed says that the exercises are definitely challenging, and maybe even less fun than Nintendo’s. So it’s not exactly a game, but it may be good for you.

This is interesting to me because I’ve often wondered about the push to extend life without the same kind of effort going into extending a decent quality of life. Do you really want to live to 150 if you can’t remember your son’s name, or where you live?

Hopefully, these games and other research will help us all live to a ripe old age while maintaining the dignity of mental clarity.

3 Responses to Old Dogs and New Tricks

  1. BruceS March 18, 2007 at 1:41 pm #

    You were doing very well until the (I hope) missing negation. So the answer is yes.
    How you could write all this without mentioning Sudoku is beyond me, but the principle makes sense. IQ likely doesn’t remain stable through life. It’s probably something like:
    IQ = IQ@12 – daysTVPerYear + (daysPuzzlesPerYear / 2 ) + (daysReadingPerYear / 4)
    The brain needs exercise. Not quite like a muscle—more like a brain.

  2. weeklyrob March 20, 2007 at 10:12 am #

    Fixed the negation. I don’t play sudoku, so….

  3. BruceS March 21, 2007 at 3:58 pm #

    With the fix, I withdraw my response. Better to die at 120 with a strong mind than to hang on to 150 but senile.

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