Stay sharp with games

Now-a-days Games are moving on to areas traditionally associated with drugs, with Project: Evo, a visual and motor-tracking game, seeking approval from the US FDA. If approved, doctors could prescribe it to their patients."You just crashed a little bit," Adam Gazzaley said. It was true: I'd slammed my rocket-powered surfboard into an icy riverbank. This was at Gazzaley's San Francisco lab, in a nook cluttered with multicolored skullcaps and wires that hooked up to an EEG.machine. The video game I was playing wasn't the sort typically pitched at kids or even middle-aged, Gen X gamers. Indeed, its intended users include people over 60 — because the game might just help fend off the mental decline that accompanies aging. After only two minutes of play, I was making all manner of mistakes, stabbing frantically at the wrong fish as the game sped up.

It was awfully hard to play, even for my Call of Duty-toughened brain. Project: Evo, as the game is called, was designed to tax several mental abilities at once. As I maneuvered the surfboard down winding river pathways, I was supposed to avoid hitting the sides, which required what Gazzaley said was "visualmotor tracking." But I also had to watch out for targets: I was tasked with tapping the screen whenever a red fish jumped out of the water. The game increased in difficulty as I improved, making the river twistier and obliging me to remember turns I'd taken. (These were "working-memory challenges.")

Soon the targets became more confusing — I was trying to tap blue birds and green fish, but the game faked me out by mixing in green birds and blue fish. This was testing my "selective attention," or how quickly I could assess a situation and react to it. "It's hard," Gazzaley said, smiling broadly as he took back the iPad I was playing on. "It's meant to really push it."

"Brain training" games like Project: Evo have become big business, with Americans spending an estimated $1.3billion a year on them. They are also a source of controversy. Industry observers warn that snake-oil salesmen abound, and nearly all neuroscientists agree there's very little evidence yet that these games counter the mental deficits that come with getting older. Gazzaley, however, is something of an outlier.

His work commands respect from even the harshest critics. He spent five years designing and testing the sort of game play I had just experienced, and he found that it does indeed appear to prompt older brains to perform like ones decades younger. ("Game changer," the cover of Nature magazine declared when it published his findings last year.) Now Project: Evo is on its own twisty path — the Boston company that is developing it, Akili, which Gazzaley advises, is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the game. If it gets that government stamp, it might become a sort of cognitive Lipitor or Viagra, a game that your doctor can prescribe for your aging mind.

In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to map, in increasing detail, just what happens as the brain ages. The picture is bleak. Beginning in our late 40s and 50s, our working memory dims, and we lose the ability to juggle simultaneous tasks. It becomes harder to screen out distractions, to stay focused while reading or shopping. Processing speed — that is, the brain's ability to react to stimuli — slows, which is one reason older people struggle to follow the speech of chattering children.Scientists have begun to trace the physical changes behind this decline. For example, the myelin sheathing that covers the brain's white matter degrades, and the brain has a harder time coordinating its different regions engaged in a mental task. This is normal aging in an otherwise healthy adult. "It's a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years," says Jonathan King, who directs a cognitive-aging programme at the National Institute on Aging.

Since Gazzaley began his career two decades ago, in his 20s, he has been fascinated by the puzzle of aging. Back then, neuroscience was in the midst of the "neuroplasticity" revolution, the discovery that the mature brain can change and evolve. Scientists used to believe that once you became an adult, your brain's capabilities were fixed, like plaster. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, aided by new brain-scanning tools, they realized this wasn't true. If you start doing something that taxes your brain in productive ways, forcing it to repeatedly engage declining skills — learning a new language, for instance — those skills get measurably sharper. The problem, of course, is that most of us are lazy. We're not often going to take up mentally difficult activities in our dotage.

Video games seemed like one possible shortcut. Researchers were discovering that playing them appeared to improve some cognitive abilities in children: Avid players were better at noticing visual stimuli and shifting the focus of their attention, the very tasks that old brains find difficult. In 2005, Nintendo released Brain Age, a slightly tongue-in-cheek game that purported to "keep your mind in shape" through a blitz of visual quizzes — like the famous Stroop Effect test, in which the word "blue" is printed in black, for example, and you have to correctly name the font's color. (Not as easy as it sounds.)

The brain-training industry was born, and soon ads from companies like Lumosity were promising to "challenge your brain with scientifically designed training." Posit Science, a company founded by the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, produced BrainHQ games meant to improve capacities like your "useful field of view," the scientific term for the width of your peripheral vision. (Yes, it too shrinks with age.) The big question about brain games is whether they sharpen everyday skills. If you regularly play a memory game — like Lumosity's version of the old classic Concentration — you'll get better at playing the game. But does it help you recall where you left your reading glasses? Does it improve your brain overall? Research has shown scant evidence of that. Even crossword puzzles — often touted as a pen-and-paper form of brain training — seem to suffer from this problem. All they do is make you better at doing crosswords.

Gazzaley surmised that if a game prodded several different mental abilities simultaneously, learning to resolve the "interference" produced by such multitasking would strengthen the brain generally. So he asked game designers from LucasArts, who made Star Wars video games, to do some freelance work for him. "They said, 'Well, you know, we've been teaching teenagers how to kill aliens for almost 20 years now, and we're ready to do something different, do something of impact,'" Gazzaley says.

By 2009, their collaboration yielded NeuroRacer. A prototype of what became Project: Evo, it required players to pilot a car down a winding path at a constant speed while trying to keep from running off the road. At the same time, users had to pay attention to a stream of flashing icons and press a button on the game controller whenever a circle appeared. As you got better at playing it, the game got harder, in order to keep you at the edge of your abilities. To test how the game affected older minds, Gazzaley sorted 46 participants between the ages of 60 and 85 into three groups. One group played NeuroRacer three times a week for a month. Another played a simplified version without the multitasking: Players either drove the car or clicked on the circles but not both during the same game. The third group didn't play at all.

The results were stark. Older adults who played the hardest version of NeuroRacer became very good at it — as good as 20-year-olds playing it for the first time. And crucially, there was "transfer."

Standard laboratory tests used to gauge a person's working memory and ability to sustain attention showed that the NeuroRacer vets had "improved significantly ." And those skills weren't the ones the game was specifically designed to focus on — their improvement was just a positive side effect. The players didn't merely become better at NeuroRacer; they also became sharper at other things.