There is no denying that brain training games are great fun and when you play them frequently you can certainly get better and better at playing them. You may feel that in playing them, you are taking steps for improving memory and for fine tuning all your other mental functions. It is acceptable to make this assumption, yet how do we know that there has actually been an improvement? Do we have scientific evidence of the success of these mental exercises?

You might be forgiven for thinking that all the brain training games have been designed taking the ever-increasing body of brain science into account. Indeed, a lot is already known about the neurological underpinnings of how memory is laid down in the first place, and then improved. Maybe they have been designed this way, but where is the evidence of how successful you can be using these exercises?

Well, recently the very revealing results of a large UK study into the effectiveness of brain exercises on improving memory etc. have been published, and they are probably not what you would have predicted. BBC television conducted this research in conjunction with the British Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer's Society.

The team enrolled 13000 adult volunteers to get involved in their rigorous experiment over a period of about one and a half months. The plan was to discover whether training the brain on a variety of tasks intended to employ different areas of the brain (such as the temporal lobes for memory and the parietal lobes for math), would strengthen mental skills, such as memory and problem-solving abilities.

The volunteers were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The first group did a broad range of brain exercises, including ones for improving memory, for ten minutes every other day for six weeks. Since the tasks were internet-based, the control group just used the internet for the same amount of time. At the end of the trial period, the brain training group was retested on the brain exercises and was found to be 33 per cent better at performing the brain games they had trained on.

This seems excellent; but were these superior mental skills transferable from the mind exercises with which the group was already familiar, to normal primary intellectual abilities, such as problem-solving and recalling sequences of groups of digits? Both groups of subjects were examined on these skills both just before the experiment and afterwards. The mean score for the two groups at the trial beginning was identical.

Upon retesting at the end of the trial, the control group's score had improved by 4.35 per cent. Surprisingly however, the score for the experimental group was almost identical. It represented only a 6.52 per cent increase over its original score. So, statistically there was no difference between the two groups. Of course, what they could not conclude was whether the small improvement was just the effect of working online. Perhaps there could have been another group that did nothing online.

However, people who enjoy brain exercises should not lose heart. Firstly, speaking from personal experience, if nothing else, they are a lot of fun! Beyond that, even though you should not expect them to help with improving memory, there are certainly a number of other strategies for improving your memory and other mental abilities, which have been scientifically-proven. These include diet, reading, taking physical exercise and listening to music.