Brain Games and Video Games On Intelligence

Brain Games have been gaining more attention lately. With people's attempts to try to improve their intelligence, games that claim to improve your cognitive function have been on the rise. But these games have been getting a lot of criticism as well. Articles such as this,

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/brain-games-are-bogus.html

disclaim the use of a game that trains a person on specific tasks that require to remember a string of symbols or numbers. Scientists find that working on such specific tasks do not enhance other parts of a person's mental ability, such as remembering long strings of numbers will not help a person's ability to work things out logically.

On the other hand, articles such as this,

http://www.newswise.com/articles/authors-develop-digital-games-to-improve-brain-function-and-well-being

from

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v494/n7438/full/494425a.html

TED Talk - http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games.html

advocate the strength in video games and how they engage people. Games help activate the brain in ways that many other forms of media lack.

Intelligence is an interesting topic to discuss because it is looked at in many different ways. Whether or not a person can remember a bunch of numbers after a set period of time is related to memory, which is also related to intelligence, but does not factor for all of intelligence. Many brain games say that they improve intelligence, and it is arguable that they improve a part of the whole. Other games that are separate from "brain games," such as action games and strategy games can be helpful to the development of brains in more ways than we have yet to discover.