A mass study from the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBSU) in the UK has claimed that brain training games do not work.

The hugely popular Nintendo DS title ‘Dr Kawashima Brain Training’ is the most prominent example of such games of course, though we’ve had our suspicions over its effects for a while now after avid user Nicole Kidman still chose to make the horrendous sci-fi flick, ‘The Invasion’ despite all that supposed cerebellum stretching.

Movie nitpicking aside, the study involved 11,500 members of the public and failed to find any improvement in mental performance after people regularly used brain-training games on their computers for a period of six weeks.

The CBSU’s Adrian Owen told the Independent there were no significant differences in tests before and after the six-week trial in any of the three groups. “The results are clear. There are no significant differences between the improvements seen in participants who played our brain-training games, and those who just went on the internet for the same length of time,” he said.

TG Daily meanwhile reports him as adding, “Our findings will no doubt surprise millions of people worldwide who do some form of brain training every day in the belief that ‘exercising’ their brain makes them better at everyday thinking tasks.” He added, “In one of our computer games that tests memory by assessing how many numbers could be remembered by players, we found it would take almost four years of playing brain training games regularly each week to remember just one extra digit!”

For the study, volunteers were split into three groups, with two practising training games every day and the third only browsing the internet.

While people did get better at doing the tests, this was simply because of practice and was not related to an overall improvement in cognitive functions such as reasoning and memory, the scientists said.

Having been told that I had the brain of a 68 year-old the last time I played ‘Brain Training’, this whole thing comes as somewhat of a relief.