On average, teachers say it takes over a month to get children re-focussed on school work following the summer holidays, so any activity which helps keep their brains active will benefit their education greatly.

Jenny Low, from online brain training portal Canny Minds, said: “As adults, we find it hard to get back into work after a two-week holiday. So it stands to reason that the six week school holiday will have an even greater effect on our children. This latest research from America highlights the real impact which the summer brain drain has on children’s education.

“There are lots of things parents can do to help their kids keep mentally active during the summer which won’t spoil their fun.”

Top Ten Brain Drain Busting Tips

1. Encourage reading
2. Limit TV
3. Set puzzles
4. Play card games
5. Go on day trips
6. Play audio books
7. Follow a sports team – scores and player stats can help with maths skills
8. Cook with your kids – following recipes and measuring quantities
9. Get your kids to plan the day themselves
10. Play family games like Monopoly

The American research shows that the amount of independent reading, which  a child does outside of school, contributes significantly to a growth in their vocabulary, verbal fluency, reading comprehension and general knowledge. 

Jenny continued: “Reading is clearly one of the most beneficial things kids can do but they’re not always that enthusiastic about it.  To help them get into reading you could try bribery!  Try setting up an incentive scheme which rewards time spent reading with little treats and they’ll soon start enjoying reading on their own.”

Philip Carter, the puzzle editor for MENSA and regular contributor to the Cannyminds.com interactive games room said: “Keeping your brain active as a young person doesn’t have to be boring.  Puzzles, quizzes and games are a great way to stimulate the mind as well as being great fun for all the family”.

www.Cannyminds.com is the UK’s leading online brain training portal with books, DVDs, audio books, games and puzzles for all ages.  As well as an online shop, it also offers independent articles and advice along with an interactive games room, which includes puzzles and quizzes developed by MENSA puzzle editor Philip Carter.

References:

1. Research conducted by The National Center for Summer Learning at John Hopkins University’s School of Education.  http://www.summerlearning.org

Photos courtesy of photosavvy and woodleywonderworks

The scientists who develop the method believe that it will prove to be a boon for education, since it offers a way to improve overall intellectual performance, so long as a person is sufficiently motivated.

So-called “brain training” puzzles are now found in most newspapers and a new generation has been developed for video game consoles such as the Nintendo DS in the hope they can keep the minds of elderly people alert.

Many undoubtedly improve memory and the speed with which a task can be done, such as solving a Sudoku puzzle. There are some, such as crosswords, that will expand vocabulary. And the elderly are known to benefit from software exercises to improve memory developed by companies such as Posit and MindFit.

But today, a Swiss-American team reports in a leading scientific journal that a computer based brain-training method designed to improve working memory also increases scores in “fluid intelligence”, or general problem-solving ability.
Currently, many psychologists believe that the only way to increase fluid intelligence is through direct practice of the tests themselves, rather than by training. But this is overturned in the work by Drs Susanne Jaeggi, Martin Buschkühl and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and University of Bern.

Today, they describe a task that improved fluid intelligence, “the ability to reason and to flexibly adapt to new situations,” says Dr Jaeggi.

After initially giving subjects a standard test for fluid intelligence, Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues gave 35 volunteers a series of training exercises designed to improve their working memory, and had 35 more controls who did not undergo the brain boot camp.

Participants saw a sequence of squares, appearing one after another on the computer screen every three seconds. The task was to decide whether the currently presented square was at the same position as one further in the sequence, so, for example whether it was the same as the one presented two or more positions earlier.

At the same time, participants heard spoken letters and their task was the same as in the visual task: decide whether the currently heard letter was the same as one presented two, three or whatever in the sequence.

“Thus, they had to continously process two modality streams independently,” says Dr Jaeggi. “The task was designed adaptively: when the participants performed well, the task became harder (so, instead of remembering the stimuli that appeared two positions ago, they would have to remember stimuli that appeared 3 positions ago). If participants performed worse, the task became easier. Thus, the task always matched the participants processing ability.”

The training was given to four groups, who repeated the exercises for 8, 12, 17, or 19 days, depending on the group. After the training, the researchers re-tested the subjects’ fluid intelligence and compared them with the untrained controls.

Although the performance of untrained controls improved slightly, they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the trained subjects showed a significant performance improvement: so they could move from solving over nine problems to 12.

Moreover, the more participants trained, the more problems they could solve in the post-test – the 19-day group could solve almost five problems more, that is an improvement of more than 40%. This dose effect, where the more you do it the more you benefit, is significant. Dr Jaeggi said that similar effects had been noted in children, when learning music, which also draws on many different skills.

“I know, there is a huge market of software concerning brain training, IQ-training, and so on. But there is no real scientific evidence that these programs actually work, that is, that they actually boost intelligence or train something else than the task itself, at least in young adults” says Dr Jaeggi.

“There is a very long history of training work going back more than 100 years trying to find transfer effects, that is, improvements in tasks that were not part of the training. ”

“Generally, we think of transfer effects as being central for most of our education system, which is based on the assumption that what we learn in school will be later applied in our (professional) life.

“But unfortunately, in research, the evidence for such transfer effects was almost negligible. although there has been some work which showed transfer effects with children, so far, there was no reliable evidence for transfer in healthy young adults (as was our sample).

The mere fact that we reliably showed transfer effects after training, and moreover, that we showed transfer to such an important function as fluid intelligence is a very new and exciting finding in our field.”

A key question, she says, is “why we found transfer, while so many others failed.”

Rather than focus on strategies, for instance the use of mnemonics to boost memory, they wanted to focus on tasks that depend on many processes (including task coordination, working memory processes, focusing your attention).
And she says motivation is important too. “Same in sports: you can not expect to get better in football if you merely run around a little bit and not really want to improve.”

Prof Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire, comments: “Many people report that computer based training games have helped improve their thinking skills, but the evidence has always been ambiguous. This study suggests that there might really be something to the idea, and hopefully future work will be able to identify what does, and doesn’t, make a real difference to people’s lives.”

And Raj Persaud, visiting Gresham professor for public understanding of psychiatry, adds: “There have been claims of this nature before for various mental strategies including the now infamous Mozart effect.

“We should wait and see how long standing the gain in brain power really is. Often these effects begin to disappear with time – it is possible that these exercises aid with nerve cell growth or nerve cell function in some way or alter neurological function in some way and we need brain scanning and other experiments to evaluate the actual structural and functional effect on brain tissue.”

However, he adds: “The results are exciting and have implications for a wide variety of fields including alzheimer’s and other dementias.”

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor The Telegraph

Photo courtesy of sunsurfr

Click on the link to buy the Nintendo DS & Brain training in the Canny Minds shop

Nintendo DS console with Brain Training

Big Brain Academy DS game

Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training DS game

1. Stewardesses’ is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
2. And ‘lollipop’ is the longest word typed with your right hand.
3. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
4. ‘Dreamt’ is the only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt’.
5. Our eyes  are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
6. The sentence: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses every letter of the alphabet.
7. The words ‘racecar’, ‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (called palindromes).
8. There are only four words in the English language which end in ‘dous’: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
9. There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: ‘abstemious’ and ‘facetious.’
10. ‘Typewriter’ is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
11. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
12. A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
13. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
14. A snail can sleep for three years.
15. Almonds are a member of the peach family.
16. Babies  are born without kneecaps – They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
17. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
18. In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
19. If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
20. Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors
21. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
22. Rubber bands  last longer when refrigerated.
23. The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.
24. The cruise liner, QE2,  moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
25. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
26. The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
27. There are more chickens than people in the world.
28. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
29. Women blink  nearly twice as much as men.

Now perhaps you know slighty more than you did before!