Direct and Indirect Speech
(softskill)
Can Video Games Fend Off
Mental Decline?
By CLIVE
THOMPSONOCT. 23, 2014
“You just
crashed a little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said.
It was true: I’d slammed my
rocket-powered surfboard into an icy riverbank. This was at Gazzaley’s San
Francisco lab, in a nook cluttered with multicolored skullcaps and wires that
hooked up to an E.E.G. machine. The video game I was playing wasn’t the sort
typically pitched at kids or even middle-aged, Gen X gamers. Indeed, its
intended users include people over 60 — because the game might just help fend
off the mental decline that accompanies aging.
It was awfully hard to play, even for my
Call of Duty-toughened brain. Project: Evo, as the game is called, was designed
to tax several mental abilities at once. As I maneuvered the surfboard down
winding river pathways, I was supposed to avoid hitting the sides, which
required what Gazzaley said was “visual-motor tracking.” But I also had to
watch out for targets: I was tasked with tapping the screen whenever a red fish
jumped out of the water. The game increased in difficulty as I improved, making
the river twistier and obliging me to remember turns I’d taken. (These were
“working-memory challenges.”) Soon the targets became more confusing — I was
trying to tap blue birds and green fish, but the game faked me out by mixing in
green birds and blue fish. This was testing my “selective attention,” or how
quickly I could assess a situation and react to it.
After only two minutes of play, I was
making all manner of mistakes, stabbing frantically at the wrong fish as the
game sped up.
“It’s hard,” Gazzaley said, smiling broadly as he took
back the iPad I was playing on. “It’s meant to really push it.”
“Brain training” games like Project: Evo
have become big business, with Americans spending an estimated $1.3 billion a
year on them. They are also a source of controversy. Industry observers warn
that snake-oil salesmen abound, and nearly all neuroscientists agree there’s
very little evidence yet that these games counter the mental deficits that come
with getting older. Gazzaley, however, is something of an outlier. His work
commands respect from even the harshest critics. He spent five years designing
and testing the sort of game play I had just experienced, and he found that it
does indeed appear to prompt older brains to perform like ones decades younger.
(“Game changer,” the cover of Nature magazine declared when it published his
findings last year.) Now Project: Evo is on its own twisty path — the Boston
company that is developing it, Akili, which Gazzaley advises, is seeking
approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the game. If it gets that
government stamp, it might become a sort of cognitive Lipitor or Viagra, a game
that your doctor can prescribe for your aging mind.
In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to map, in increasing
detail, just what happens as the brain ages. The picture is bleak. Beginning in
our late 40s and 50s, our working memory dims, and we lose the ability to
juggle simultaneous tasks. It becomes harder to screen out distractions, to
stay focused while reading or shopping. Processing speed — that is, the brain’s
ability to react to stimuli — slows, which is one reason older people struggle
to follow the speech of chattering children. Scientists have begun to trace the
physical changes behind this decline. For example, the myelin sheathing that
covers the brain’s white matter degrades, and the brain has a harder time
coordinating its different regions engaged in a mental task. This dropoff has
nothing to do with Alzheimer’s or dementia; this is normal aging in an
otherwise healthy adult. “It’s a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or
70 years,” says Jonathan King, who directs a cognitive-aging program at the
National Institute on Aging.
Since Gazzaley began his career two
decades ago, in his 20s, he has been fascinated by the puzzle of aging. Back
then, neuroscience was in the midst of the “neuroplasticity” revolution, the discovery
that the mature brain can change and evolve. Scientists used to believe that
once you became an adult, your brain’s capabilities were fixed, like plaster.
But in the 1990s and early 2000s, aided by new brain-scanning tools, they
realized this wasn’t true. If you start doing something that taxes your brain
in productive ways, forcing it to repeatedly engage declining skills — learning
a new language, for instance — those skills get measurably sharper. The
problem, of course, is that most of us are pretty lazy. We’re not often going
to take up mentally difficult activities in our dotage.
Video games seemed like one possible
shortcut. Researchers were discovering that playing them appeared to improve
some cognitive abilities in children: Avid players were better at noticing
visual stimuli and shifting the focus of their attention, the very tasks that
old brains find difficult.
In 2005, Nintendo released Brain Age, a
slightly tongue-in-cheek game that purported to “keep your mind in shape”
through a blitz of visual quizzes — like the famous Stroop Effect test, in
which the word “blue” is printed in black, for example, and you have to
correctly name the font’s color. (Not as easy as it sounds.) The brain-training
industry was born, and soon ads from companies like Lumosity were promising to
“challenge your brain with scientifically designed training.” Posit Science, a
company founded by the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, produced BrainHQ games
meant to improve capacities like your “useful field of view,” the scientific
term for the width of your peripheral vision. (Yes, it too shrinks with age.)
The big question about brain games is
whether they sharpen everyday skills. If you regularly play a memory game —
like Lumosity’s version of the old classic Concentration — you’ll get better at
playing the game. But does it help you recall where you left your reading
glasses? Does it improve your brain overall? Research has shown scant evidence
of that. Even crossword puzzles — often touted as a pen-and-paper form of brain
training — seem to suffer from this problem. All they do is make you better at
doing crosswords.
Gazzaley surmised that if a game prodded
several different mental abilities simultaneously, learning to resolve the
“interference” produced by such multitasking would strengthen the brain
generally. So he asked game designers from LucasArts, who made Star Wars video
games, to do some freelance work for him. “They said, ‘Well, you know, we’ve
been teaching teenagers how to kill aliens for almost 20 years now, and we’re
ready to do something different, do something of impact,’ ” Gazzaley says.
By 2009, their collaboration yielded
NeuroRacer. A prototype of what became Project: Evo, it required players to
pilot a car down a winding path at a constant speed while trying to keep from
running off the road. At the same time, users had to pay attention to a stream
of flashing icons and press a button on the game controller whenever a circle
appeared. As you got better at playing it, the game got harder, in order to
keep you at the edge of your abilities.
To test how the game affected older
minds, Gazzaley sorted 46 participants between the ages of 60 and 85 into three
groups. One group played NeuroRacer three times a week for a month. Another
played a simplified version without the multitasking: Players either drove the
car or clicked on the circles but not both during the same game. The third
group didn’t play at all.
The results were stark. Older adults who
played the hardest version of NeuroRacer became very good at it — as good as
20-year-olds playing it for the first time. And crucially, there was
“transfer.” Standard laboratory tests used to gauge a person’s working memory
and ability to sustain attention showed that the NeuroRacer vets had “improved
significantly.” And those skills weren’t the ones the game was specifically
designed to focus on — their improvement was just a positive side effect. The
players didn’t merely become better at NeuroRacer; they also became sharper at
other things. The control groups — whose members didn’t play the game or who
didn’t drive and identify objects at the same time — didn’t get the same boost.
They just got older.
Gazzaley could also see his subjects’
brains change on E.E.G. readings. The electrical patterns of those who played
the full NeuroRacer resembled those of 20-year-olds, just as their gaming
performances had. Key measures of activity in the prefrontal cortex altered,
suggesting improvement in what researchers call executive control. Measures of
brain “coherence” were better, too, indicating that different parts of the
brain were in better communication with one another. Perhaps most remarkably,
these gains held up over time. When Gazzaley brought the participants back into
the lab six months later — during which time they hadn’t played the game — the
multitasking players still performed better on diagnostic tests than the
control groups.
The results sent a jolt through the
academic-neuroscientist community. A Boston health care firm approached
Gazzaley about producing a commercial version to “move this technology out of
the lab into industry,” he says, which led to the creation of Akili. Gazzaley
embarked on fresh collaborations. One is with Zynga, the company responsible
for the hit game FarmVille, which is helping design MediTrain, a game that
promotes “mindfulness” meditation techniques.
The lab where Gazzaley works is like a child’s fantasy
version of a research facility. There’s a mood-lit game-playing room with a
lipstick red chair and an 85-inch plasma TV, “the biggest, highest-quality TV
you can buy.” When I visited the place earlier this month, his 24-year-old
research associate, Cammie Rolle, jumped and waved her arms in front of the
screen, as if doing aerobics. An Xbox Kinect camera tracked her movements as
she played Gazzaley’s new game, Body Brain Trainer. Each jerk and leap
controlled a horse on the screen, as she tried to avoid obstacles and lunged
toward targets (vegetables and colors, in this case). The goal, Gazzaley said,
was to see how physical activity might influence mental training. He hopes that
forcing subjects to coordinate physical movements with mental pattern-matching
will generate the sort of productive interference that, as in the case of
NeuroRacer, strengthens multitasking and executive control.
“We think the embodied cognition will create a faster
learning curve,” he said. It was certainly a workout. After two minutes of
jumping and dodging, Rolle’s heart rate was over 140. They won’t know if it
improved her brain, though, for another year.
As eager as Gazzaley is to promote his research, he is also
reflexively cautious. He warned me several times that his findings will need
more testing and pointed out that the data is tentative when it comes to how
deeply it affects everyday mental performance. The truth is that despite 15
years of research, we don’t actually know how — or if, really — brain-training
games work. “It’s a big, muddled mess,” says Thomas Redick, a cognitive
psychologist at Purdue University. The published research is a grab bag of
contradictory findings: Some experiments find minimal improvements, others
none. Often studies test games with such different emphases — working memory,
field of view or mental speed — that the results can’t be compared
meaningfully. Findings from experiments with subjects who have conditions like
A.D.D. don’t necessarily apply to the elderly. And while there is plenty of
work on children, including claims made by the educational firm Pearson that
its product CogMed increases their working memory, the evidence on this front
is also uncertain.
In the commercial world, though, hyperbole reigns. App
stores are littered with brazen claims — Elevate-Brain Training, for example,
is “based on extensive research.” Ulman Lindenberger, a director at the Max
Planck Institute, recently published a study that found that 100 days of
cognitive training yielded a “relatively minor” improvement in working memory.
Soon afterward, a German brain-training firm cited his paper on its website,
despite the lack of any connection between his research and its product. The
company even appropriated the Max Planck logo.
This month, an international group of 30 scientists —
including Lindenberger — became so fed up that they issued “TheConsensus on the
Brain Training Industry From the Scientific Community,” a withering statement
denouncing the hype by both companies and media. “Claims promoting brain
games,” they wrote, “are frequently exaggerated and at times outright
misleading.” One of the group’s organizers, Laura Carstensen, the director of
the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, “I started just feeling like we were
obligated — we the scientific community in the aging world — to say something
and to not just sit by and have this go on.” She is particularly enraged by
claims that games can forestall Alzheimer’s. “I find that unconscionable,
because there’s zero evidence for that, and it is on top of the list of aging
people’s fears.” Carstensen has heard from older people who assumed the games’
benefits were proven, as well as from poor patients who were forgoing other
daily items to pay monthly subscription fees for brain games.
Carstensen and her colleagues recommend that people
adopt more healthful habits, including regular physical activity, because a
weak cardiovascular system limits blood flow to the brain. Active efforts to
master new skills — a new sport, another language — may help, as does an active
social life. None of these techniques, of course, have million-dollar
industries intent on proving they’re good for our brains.
That said, Carstensen and other skeptics do not
dismiss brain training entirely. If you’re playing these games in moderation, they
say, there isn’t any harm. And maybe they help. “It’s perfectly possible that
if you do this for some time that you will see some changes in your brain,”
Lindenberger says. “I mean, why not?” They all want to see more rigorous
research done, and many cite Gazzaley’s work as a model.
Gazzaley himself signed the letter, though he pushed
the group to use less pessimistic rhetoric. “I really was a pain,” he says. One
concern was that excessively negative statements might scare off
research-funding agencies. “Do we really want to sabotage this?” he asked them.
“Does anyone actually think there’s nothing here? My view is that from the work
that we’ve done, there’s a signal. I’m a cautious optimist. If I didn’t think
there was a signal, I’d be out of here — I’m not going to waste my entire
career.”
Even Michael Merzenich, the founder of Posit Science —
one of the oldest makers of brain-training products — acknowledges that
skepticism is warranted. “There is a lot of hocus-pocus in the marketplace and
a lot of exaggeration,” he told me. Yet when it comes to his own BrainHQ games,
Merzenich confidently argues that they are proven to work, noting that they
have been used in many more studies than his competitors’ products. “For a lot
of people, in the state they’re in, sitting down in front of your iPad or
computer can save their bacon,” he says. He too recommends leading an active
life but says that “for time spent, there’s nothing more efficient for driving
neurological change” than his games. His views make Merzenich a polarizing
character in the field. When I asked Lindenberger about Merzenich, he said, “I
don’t see how he can base his business on science in the sense of having
evidence for these very big claims.”
So far, only one study has followed a large group of
older subjects for years and also looked for real-world effects. Advanced
Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly, or Active, began in 1999
with nearly 3,000 healthy older adults. One group of the subjects played a
crude speed-of-processing computer game, originally developed by Karlene Ball,
the chairwoman of the psychology department at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham, and later acquired by Posit Science. It flashed pictures for
shorter and shorter durations and challenged players to identify them. These
subjects received a total of only about 10 hours’ worth of training over five
weeks, with a few hours of follow-up “booster” training nearly a year later and
then again three years after that.
Yet the benefits seemed to hold up. When tested fully
10 years later, the group of video-game players still performed better on a
speed-of-processing test than members of a control group that received no
training. More startling were some results found outside the lab: Those who had
played the computer game had been involved in 50 percent fewer car accidents
than the control group. The training seemingly made them more perceptive behind
the wheel.
The next step toward legitimacy — beyond long and
patient studies like this one — might come from the F.D.A. Several games are
now going through the federal approval process. Akili is currently arranging
trials of Project: Evo to treat conditions that accompany routine aging and as
a tool to detect the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Eddie Martucci, Akili’s vice
president, says he wants to do enough tests to prove the game’s power not just
to the F.D.A. but also to doctors, so they’ll prescribe it: “It’s not our
business model to squeak through,” Martucci says. “We want doctors and
regulatory agencies to have no doubt.”
Merzenich’s company, Posit Science, is pursuing F.D.A.
approval for a speed-of-processing game that has shown success in treating
hemispatial neglect in stroke patients, a condition that causes patients to
lose one side of their vision and sometimes neglect a limb. “We saw some
real-world effects,” says Tom Van Vleet, a neuropsychologist who worked on the
game before he was hired by Posit Science. After playing the game, he claims,
“one guy used his arm for the first time in six years.”
Ann Stewart, who is 66, participated in Gazzaley’s NeuroRacer
study. Recently I visited her cozy, art-filled home, where she has lived alone
since her husband died several years ago. Witty and white-haired, Stewart
hardly seemed cognitively challenged. Before retiring, she was a partner in a
commercial real estate firm. (“I had a huge Rolodex of brokers and people,” she
said.) She also reads avidly and sings; not long ago, she attended a Big Sur
musicians’ camp. But in her 60s, she found herself becoming forgetful, leaving
her purse in the car overnight. “That was scary,” she told me. When she heard
about the trial, she jumped at the opportunity.
She became quite addicted to NeuroRacer — and good at
it. “I was really kind of sad when they took it away from me!” she said. Her
experience illustrates both the potential and the limits of brain training.
Technically, she’s part of the cohort who improved and says she feels she
became better at multitasking, “more conscious of what I was doing every day.”
But she struggled when I asked her for examples of how this had improved her
daily life. In fact, to keep from forgetting her purse, she hit upon a more
prosaic, low-tech solution: She bought a bigger one that’s harder to leave
behind accidentally.
The elderly have long been masters of devising clever
tricks to compensate for mental failings, turning objects all around them into
cognitive props. Medicine might be left on the kitchen table, its presence
there a daily reminder that pills need to be taken. To-do lists on Post-it
notes serve as scaffolds for their memory. If you’ve already lost cognitive
function, and brain training can only go so far, you find other ways to cope.
It might very well be that equally promising
technology for our brains will augment rather than improve them. Already
technology firms are developing methods to help the elderly by offloading
memory and cognition, creating digital tools more sophisticated than oversize
purses. The company Vitality, for example, has created GlowCaps, pill bottles
that track when they’ve been opened. If users forget to take their pills on
time, LEDs in the bottle cap might light up as a reminder; if it goes unopened
for hours, the bottle sends an alert by email or text. A 2010 trial found that
users of these smart bottles had a 98 percent rate of taking meds on time,
compared with 71 percent in a control group. (Full disclosure: I have given an
unpaid talk about my book “Smarter Than You Think” for Partners Healthcare, the
nonprofit agency that financed this experiment.) A small study involving a
similar device in China also found positive results.
You can imagine a world where tools like this offer
compensating help in even more active ways. Self-driving cars could
significantly help seniors cope with the mental challenges associated with
driving. Wearable computers like the Apple Watch or Google Glass could combine
GPS and location sensors to remind our aging brains of tasks we planned to do:
If you’re at the grocery store, don’t forget the dog food.
In younger people, digital tools have prompted social
fears — at what point have we outsourced so much of our brain that it’s no
longer our brain? The elderly, already dealing with cognitive decline, may not
have as much use for such metaphysical questions. Having the world help you
think, through whatever means, may be philosophy enough.
Clive Thompson is a contributing
writer for the magazine and the author of “Smarter Than You Think.”
Statement :
“You just crashed a
little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said (Direct)
Adam Gazzaley said he just
crashed a little bit (Indirect)
“It’s a rough life,
being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years,” says Jonathan King (direct)
Jonathan King says
It’s a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years. (indirect)
Question :
“Do we really want to
sabotage this?” he asked them. (direct)
he asked them that do
they really want to sabotage them. (indirect)
Imperative :
“I was really kind of
sad when they took it away from me!” she said.(direct)
she said she was really
kind of sad when they took it away from her. (indirect)
Name : Achmad Andika
S.
Class : 4sa04
NPM : 1711923
Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris Berbasis Komputer.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/magazine/can-video-games-fend-off-mental-decline.html?_r=0
