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Can 'brain games' really help you improve the way your brain functions?
You've probably seen ads for apps promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day. Hundreds of so-called "brain training" programs can be purchased for download. These simple games are designed to challenge mental abilities, with the ultimate goal of improving the performance of important everyday tasks.
But can just clicking away at animations of swimming fish or flashed streets signs on your phone really help you improve the way your brain functions?
Two large groups of scientists and mental health practitioners published consensus statements, months apart in 2014, on the effectiveness of these kinds of brain games. Both included people with years of research experience and expertise in cognition, learning, skill acquisition, neuroscience and dementia. Both groups carefully considered the same body of evidence available at the time.
Yet, they issued exactly opposite statements.
One concluded that "there is little evidence that playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that it enables one to better navigate a complex realm of everyday life."
The other argued that "a substantial and growing body of evidence shows that certain cognitive training regimens can significantly improve cognitive function, including in ways that generalize to everyday life."
[...]The most important lesson from the literature on training is this: If you want to improve your performance on a task that's important to you, practice that task. Playing brain games may only make you better at playing brain games.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @08:30PM
The cold fusion / free energy group seem to fit that description, but in that case the consensus is formed around the lack of evidence rather than the abundance of evidence.
The "creation scientists" also fit the description very well. The consensus side has a ton of observations that are largely consistent with the consensus model, and the other side has a slew of ad hoc explanations that are generally not consistent with each other. You can show the evidence, explain the model, show how they hold together, but if the group you're talking to ignore all of that and base their model upon their belief system rather than the observations, you have nowhere else to turn to except "the scientific consensus is . . . "
Somewhere along the way climate science became a political issue (basically when the big fossil fuel industry made it into one). It is now the same as with creation scientists, where you have a mountain of diverse measurements that are consistent with a general model of what is going on, and you have a vocal group nitpicking details with ad hoc and outright wrong counterpoints (like how the sea level is rising due to rocks falling into the ocean [sciencemag.org] (and all the other stuff in that link). And, more importantly, and just like with the creation scientists, there is no alternative model being put forward.
"The scientific consensus", in this case at least, is the scientific consensus model because there isn't another credible alternative to debate against, and the one we have was arrived at by consensus.