Brain Rules for Aging Well: 10 Principles for Staying Vital, Happy, and Sharp

by John Medina

The researchers gathered a cohort of cognitively healthy seniors, average age seventy-four years. This was christened the ACTIVE (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly) study. The cohort was randomly assigned into four groups. One group did nothing (the control), one got training to improve memory, and one got training to improve reasoning. The fourth group was exposed to the processing-speed game for ten sessions, each about an hour long, over five or six weeks. (A random sampling also got “booster” exposures around one year and three years later.) The researchers then sat back for ten years, waited for the cohort to reach their mideighties, and looked for signs of dementia. The results were a bombshell. At the end of ten years, people in the processing-speed group were 48 percent less likely to get dementia than any other group. That’s astonishing. For one thing, the subjects were exposed for less than a day’s worth of total training, yet the effects echoed with a cognitive sonic boom ten years later. That’s what I call far transfer. For another, subjects in the group who’d received training to boost memory showed no improvement in those skills, essentially a waste of time.