Institute For The Future

Grandma...can I have my Nintendo DS back? NOW!!!!

Grandkids having their gaming devices co-opted by their elders is a looming threat. Okay...that's a bit of an exageration, however, the popularity of such games as Nintendo's Brain Age and Posit's Brain Fitness, shows that consumers may be onto something.

 

The giant Nintendo store in Manhattan was swarming with silver-haired citizens and their grandchildren. The elders, gathered on a recent Saturday, weren't there to spoil the kids, however. Nintendo was hosting a video game competition to determine the "Coolest Grandparent," and the aging gamers in the store were competing for a Nintendo DS handheld game player. They weren't playing Super Mario Bros. either, but a product called Brain Age, a mind challenger targeted at one of the fastest-growing segments of the game market: people over 40 worried about losing their mental edge.

 

The Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab at the University of Virginia isn't sold on the idea of mental exercises slowing memory decline.

 

Salthouse discovered that most brain-training studies suffer from a "chicken or the egg" problem. It could be that people who performed well in studies involving mental exercises were more mentally agile to begin with. It is true that practice makes perfect, says Matthew L. Shapiro, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "The more you try to remember, the better your skill at remembering." Still, he says there is little evidence that those improvements will lead to overall mental improvement, and a brain disease "will ultimately overwhelm any efforts to better your skills."

 

However, Michael Merzenich, believes that intense training with complex computer programs can rewire elderly brains.

 

Brain research will see much more focus (both research and in new services) as baby boomers continue to age and drive the next wave of health innovation.