Video Games Offer the Potential of “Experiential Medicine”

hubie writes:

Diverse Digital Interventions Remediate Cognitive Aging in Healthy Older Adults:

After a decade of work, scientists at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Center have developed a suite of video game interventions that improve key aspects of cognition in aging adults.

The games, which co-creator Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, says can be adapted to clinical populations as a new form of "experiential medicine," showed benefits on an array of important cognitive processes, including short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.

Each employs adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Gazzaley's lab pioneered in the widely cited 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature, which first demonstrated it was possible to restore diminished mental faculties in older people with just four weeks of training on a specially designed video game.

These algorithms achieve better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing in difficulty, depending on how well someone is playing the game. That keeps less skilled players from becoming overwhelmed, while still challenging those with greater ability. The games using these algorithms recreate common activities, such as driving, exercising and playing a drum, and use the skills each can engender to retrain cognitive processes that become deficient with age.

[...] The lab's most recent invention is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, that not only taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces. [...]

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