Episode 84: Brain training

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In the first episode under our new podcast name (it’s now the Science Fictions podcast!), we ask whatever happened to all those games that claimed to tell you your “brain age”—games that turned into a whole scientific literature on brain training.

We discuss: the still-unresolved question of whether training one specific cognitive ability makes you generally smarter; seemingly endless contrasting meta-analyses; and the small matter of what brain training might tell us about the nature of intelligence.

(If you can repeat the list of numbers from the top in reverse order then you have the brain of a 25-year-old. If you’re 25 or younger, then I don’t know what to tell you.)

We’re now an official part of the Works in Progress podcast world. You can find their other podcasts, including Hard Drugs, the one we talked about on today’s episode (about the remarkable development of a drug for HIV), at podcast.worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* The 2008 PNAS paper that started the craze for working memory training

* The under-discussed rebuttal

* 2013 meta-analysis concluding there’s no evidence for far transfer

* 2015 meta-analysis concluding there is no convincing evidence brain training is effective

* 2016 meta-analysis saying there is no convincing evidence brain training is NOT effective

* Very useful and detailed 2016 review of the evidence and the methodological issues inherent in brain training (including active vs. passive control groups)

* 2020 meta-meta-analysis arguing that the active-passive distinction doesn’t matter

* 2023 review criticising the meta-meta-analysis

* And the authors’ own 2020 meta-analysis

* 2022 meta-analysis of commercial brain training in older people

Credits

The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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