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Playing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Dementia by 48%, Suggests a New Study

Video games, the world has come to realize, can do good. Twenty or thirty years ago, people had a harder time accepting this, much to the frustration of daily-gaming youngsters such as myself. I remember deciding, for a school science project, to demonstrate that video games improve “hand-eye coordination,” the go-to benefit in those days to explain why they weren't all bad. But as our understanding of video games has become more sophisticated, as have video games themselves, it's become clear that we can engineer them to improve much more about ourselves than that.

The New Yorker‘s Dan Hurley recently wrote about findings from a study called Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE), which began with three thousand participants back in 1998. “The participants, who had an average age of 73.6 at the beginning of the trial, were randomly divided into four groups. The first group, which served as control, received no brain training at all. The next two were given ten hours of classroom instruction on how to improve memory or reasoning. The last group performed something called speed-of-processing training” by playing a kind of video game for ten hour-long sessions spread over five weeks.

A decade into the study, some of the participants received extra training. 14 percent of the group who received no training met the criteria for dementia, 12.1 percent did in the group who received speed-of-processing training, and only 8.2 percent did in the group who received all possible training. “In all, the researchers calculated, those who completed at least some of these booster sessions were forty-eight-per-cent less likely to be diagnosed with dementia after ten years than their peers in the control group.”

Intriguing findings, and ones that have set off a good deal of media coverage. What sort of video game did ACTIVE use to get these results? The Wall Street Journal‘s Sumathi Reddy reports that “the exercise used in the study was developed by researchers but acquired by Posit Science, of San Francisco, in 2007,” who have gone on to market a version of it called Double Decision. In it, the player “must identify an object at the center of their gaze and simultaneously identify an object in the periphery,” like cars, signs, and other objects on a variety of landscapes. “As players get correct answers, the presentation time speeds up, distractors are introduced and the targets become more difficult to differentiate.”

You can see that game in action, and learn a little more about the study, in the Wall Street Journal video above. Effective brain-training video games remain in their infancy (and a few of the articles about ACTIVE's findings fail to mention Lumos Labs' $2 million payment to the government to settle charges that the company falsely claimed that their games could stave off dementia) but if the ones that work can harness the addictive power of an Angry Birds or a Candy Crush, we must prepare ourselves for a sharp generation of senior citizens indeed.

Note: The Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He's at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books' Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Playing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Dementia by 48%, Suggests a New Study is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Why You Should Give Yourself One Night Each Week
One of the more recent steps I've taken to increase my happiness is to start going to a regular dance class. I sat down and wrote a list of things that made me happy, and then considered how I could do more of them. Climbing and dancing were right up there on the list. Then I was lucky enough to find this total beginners dance class which is very silly and very fun. I also started swing dancing and found a gang of people to climb with.

I'd say spending one evening a week dancing and one evening climbing has made a massive difference to my happiness. I feel much better in my skin because my body is used to exercise, and I've also made some really nice new friends. It also has a lasting effect across the rest of the week. Even when the rest of my life feels a bit gloomy, I'm looking forward to Tuesday evenings to get my swag on. (That's what Beyoncé calls it. I'm not 100% sure I've used the term correctly. Don't judge.)

Can I encourage you all to take a moment out of your day to watch this cockatoo getting his swag on to Backstreet's Back. You might have watched it before, but it's worth a repeat. Apparently there are very few animals that can actually dance, i.e. move spontaneously to a beat - mainly different types of parrot and the odd Asian elephant. But we humans are at it all over the world. Dance seems to be a natural instinct for us, with almost all human cultures having developed some form of dance. Apparently the evolutionary reason for this may be to spot genetically robust mates, to ward off other people from your mate, and/or to foster a sense of community.

To be honest, none of these fully feel like they capture the whole picture. For me, there is something about switching off the analytical part of my brain and putting my focus into moving instead that feels amazing. Also, there is a big difference between how I feel practicing a dance move to a teacher saying "ONE two three four, ONE two three four" to when they play the music and switch it up loud. Suddenly I get a jolt of energy and joy and just let rip.

There is a lot of evidence that dancing is good for you, physically and mentally. In fact, one study even indicated an 8-week tango course has comparable effects to an 8-week meditation course, decreasing depression and increasing satisfaction with life, effects that were maintained even a month after the courses ended. Another study showed reduced depression following salsa lessons, though over half the participants dropped out - a common problem in my experience with dance classes.

I've also seen evidence that dancing can help with cognitive health, as anything does which requires you to learn new stuff, and memorise things, e.g. complicated moves. It also helps with decision making as you have to decide which move to make next, and seems to delay dementia. And the range of movement and balance required in most dances mean it is particularly good exercise for the body.

Although there is lots of research implying dance is the bees knees, I don't think it has to be dance to get the happiness hit. If anything, my climbing evening is more important to me. I just think the key is to spend one night a week doing something purely for your own enjoyment, especially if you feel like you are improving at it. We can be blocked by the fear of having to face a class full of new people or worrying we won't know the right steps. But it can transform your week, even when you have to drag yourself out after a tough day at work.
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Malcolm Gladwell Asks Hard Questions about Money & Meritocracy in American Higher Education: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Podcast

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Image by Kris Krüg, via Flickr Commons

Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast kicked off this summer and in his very first episode, he took on the question of how women have broken into male-dominated fields, and the many reasons that so often hasn't happened. Having set this tone, Gladwell asks in a more recent inquiry—a three-part series spanning Episodes 4 through 7—a similar question about what we might call meritocracy in education, a value fundamental to liberal democracy, however that's interpreted. As Gladwell puts it in “Carlos Doesn't Remember,” “This is what civilized societies are supposed to do: to provide opportunities for people to make the most of their ability. So that if you're born poor, you can move up. If you work hard, you can improve your life.”

Over some sentimental, homespun orchestration, Gladwell points out that Americans have told ourselves that this is our birthright, “that every kid can become president.” We have seen ourselves this way despite the fact that at the country's origin, higher offices were solely the property of propertied men, a small minority even then. Lest we forget, for all their good intentions, Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack and later collection, “The Way to Wealth,” were written as satires, “relentlessly scathing social and political commentary,” writes Jill Lepore, that mock wishful thinking and exaggerated ambition even as they offer helpful hints for organized, diligent living. Americans, the more cynical of us might think, have always believed impossible things, and the myth of meritocracy is one of them.

But Gladwell, skimming past the cultural history, wants to genuinely ask the question, “is it true? Is the system geared to serve the poor smart kid, or the rich smart kid?” Apart from our beliefs and political ideologies, what can we really say about what he calls, in economics terms, “the rate of capitalization” in the U.S.? This number, Gladwell explains, measures “the percentage of people in any group who are able to reach their potential.” Better than “its GDP, or its growth rate, or its per-capita income,” a society's capitalization rate, he says, allows us to judge “how successful and just” a country is—and in the case of the U.S. in particular, how much it lives up to its ideals.

The first episode in the series (Episode 4 of the podcast, stream it above) introduces us to Gladwell's first subject, Carlos, a very bright high school student in Los Angeles, and Eric Eisner, a retired entertainment lawyer who devotes his time to scouting out talented kids from low income families and helping them get into private schools. Eisner did exactly that for Carlos, finding him a place in an upscale private Brentwood school in the fifth grade. Early in Gladwell's interview with Carlos, the question of what James Heckman at Boston Review identifies as the “non-cognitive characteristics” that inhibit social success comes up. These are as often “physical and mental health” and the soft skills of social interaction as they are access to something as seemingly mundane as a pair of tennis shoes that fit.

Carlos, a “really, really gifted kid,” Gladwell reiterates, cannot make it into and through the complicated social system of private school without Eisner, who bought him new tennis shoes, and who provides other material and social forms of support for the students he mentors. Students like Carlos, Gladwell argues, need not only mentors, but patrons in the mold of an ancient Roman patrician: “not just any advocate: a high-powered guy with lots of connections, who can get you in and watch over you.” The key to class mobility, in other words, lies with the arbitrary noblesse oblige of those who have already made it, generally with some considerable advantages of their own. The remainder of the episode explores the obvious and non-obvious problems with this modern-day patronage system.

In “Food Fight,” the next part of the mini-series on “capitalization,” Gladwell and his colleagues open the door on the world of prestigious liberal arts colleges' dining services, starting at Bowdoin College in Maine, a place where the food services are “in a whole different class.” Bowdoin's excellent food, Gladwell argues, represents a “moral problem.” To help us understand, he makes a direct comparison with Bowdoin's elite competitor, Vassar College, whose student dining is more in line with what most of us experienced at college; in one student's understated phrase, there's “room for improvement.” What the food comparison illustrates is this: when many elite institutions doubled their financial aid budgets a decade or so ago to increase enrollment of low-income students, other budget lines, so Vassar's president claims, took such a hit that food, facilities, and other services suffered.

Vassar's current president transformed the student body from primarily full-tuition-paying students to primarily students “who pay very little.” The egalitarian move means the college must lean too heavily on its endowment and on the paying students. Gladwell doesn't delve into what we've also been hearing about for at least the last decade: as institutions like Vassar accept and fund increasing numbers of low-income students, other schools charged legally with providing for the public good, like the University of California system, have raised tuition to levels unaffordable to thousands of prospective students.

Colleges across the country may have raised tuition rates to their current astronomical levels in part to better fund poorer applicants, but they have also faced stiff criticism for spending huge amounts on athletics, building projects, and exorbitant administrative salaries. The food comparison presents us with an either/or scenario, but the moral problem inhabits a much grayer reality than Gladwell acknowledges. Likewise, in the story of Carlos, we come to understand why smart kids from poor neighborhoods face so many impediments once they arrive at elite institutions. But we don't hear about why so many poor kids fail to achieve at all due to what what Heckman calls “the principle source of inequality today”—children born into poverty begin life at a severe disadvantage from the very start, leading to social divisions of the “skilled and unskilled” even in early childhood.

We do get a broader picture in the final episode in the series, “My Little Hundred Millions,” in which Gladwell looks into another moral problem: In the story of Henry Rowan, who in the early ‘90s donated $100 million to a tiny university in New Jersey, we see a stark contrast to the way most philanthropists operate, almost as a rule making their generous gifts to elite, already wealthy schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. This system of philanthropy perpetuates inequality in higher education and keeps elite institutions elite, even as—in places like Vassar—it gives them the reserve capital they need to fund lower-income students. Like any complex institutional system with a long, tangled history of exclusion and privilege, higher education in the U.S. offers us a very good model for studying inequality.

To hear Gladwell's full assessment of meritocracy or “capitalization,” you'll need to listen to the full series as it builds on each example to make its larger point. Each episode's webpage also includes links to reference documents and featured books so that you can continue the investigation on your own, correcting for the podcast's blind spots and biases. What Gladwell's series does well, as do many of his pop sociological bestsellers, is give us concrete examples that run up against many of our abstract preconceptions. It's an interesting approach—structuring an extended look at exceptionalism and its problems around three exceptional cases. But it is these cases, with all their complications and complexity, that often get lost in over-generalized discussions about higher education and the myths and realities of social mobility.

Malcolm Gladwell: Taxes Were High and Life Was Just Fine

Malcolm Gladwell: What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Malcolm Gladwell Asks Hard Questions about Money & Meritocracy in American Higher Education: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Podcast is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Are GOP Leaders Ever Going to Dump Trump?

This article appears in slightly different form in the Financial Times.

Traditionally, the presidential campaign experiences a lull between the summer conventions and the Labor Day holiday at the beginning of September. Traditionally, political parties do not nominate someone as unstable and desperate for attention as Donald Trump. Rather than suffer a moment's repose, the Republican nominee has spent the past week testing the proposition that his own party will continue to support him no matter how outrageous and offensive his behavior.

For Republicans who no longer have to face voters, Trump has made the decision to opt out an easy one. Both former Bush presidents have declined to endorse him or appear at their party's convention. Powerful criticism of Trump from Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, has helped to put Utah in play for the Democrats for the first time in half a century. Another recent defector is Richard Hanna, a Republican congressman from upstate New York who said last week that he would vote for Hillary Clinton—and who is not running for re-election.

Conservative foreign policy eminences, intellectuals, and journalists have been breaking ranks even more volubly. The columnist George Will declared in June that he was quitting the Republican Party, prompting the predictable Twitter assault from Trump. Other leading voices on the right—including Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Max Boot, David Brooks, Robert Kagan, and David Frum—have declared positions ranging from could-never-vote-for-Trump to will-vote-for-Clinton.

For candidates and party officials, however, calculation has pre-empted principle. Most do not think they have the luxury of conscience when it comes to breaking with Trump. Part of this is simple fear. Trump, a petulant and vindictive man, requires little provocation to unleash a storm of personal invective, along with his volunteer militia of digital trolls, at anyone who dares to challenge him. The larger factor is political realism. Republican Senate and House of Representatives candidates know that regardless of how strongly they may object to him, their fortunes are largely tied to their party's nominee.

This is the predicament in which Paul Ryan finds himself. The speaker of the House says he hasn't written Trump a “blank check.” That, however, is precisely what he did when he endorsed him, with exquisitely bad timing, just as Trump was going into bigoted paroxysms about the unfairness of a “Mexican judge” ruling in a lawsuit filed against him. A moving public plea to Ryan from Khizr Khan, the father of the Muslim American Army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, prompted no change of heart. Neither did Trump's extraordinary attack on Khan and his wife, nor even Trump's ostentatious delay in endorsing Ryan for re-election. There appears to be no limit to Trump's overdraft protection from party leaders.

While morally untenable, their position makes sense from the perspective of preserving the Republican congressional majority. The past two decades have seen a trend away from ticket-splitting—voting for one party's presidential candidate and the other party's candidates for House and Senate races. This pattern suggests that if Trump goes down to a crushing defeat in November, Republican Senate candidates are likely to fall with him in key races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire. Efforts by down-ballot candidates to separate themselves from their party's nominee could easily make matters worse, alienating the base of Trump supporters without bringing meaningful gains among Democrats or swing voters.

This leaves survival-minded Republican politicians in a pretzel-like posture. No one has faced a more yogic contortion than John McCain, the Arizona senator and 2008 Republican nominee. Trump appalled everyone last summer with his ghastly comment that McCain, a former prisoner of war who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, was not a genuine war hero because he had been captured. Last week, McCain issued a written statement saying he felt “morally bound to speak” in response to Trump's comments about the Khan family. As with Ryan, Trump pointedly postponed endorsing McCain in his upcoming primary race. For all that, McCain has not revoked his own endorsement of Trump.

At some point the dam may burst, either because the level of cognitive dissonance required becomes intolerable, or because politicians perceive their interests to be served by formally breaking with Trump. This was the bet Ted Cruz made at the Republican convention, when he was booed for refusing to endorse Trump, telling party members to vote with their consciences. The Texas senator is gambling that standing against Trump will make him look principled and prophetic in 2020.

A wider Republican abandonment of Trump, if it comes, will be about self-preservation. Last week, Mike Coffman, who represents a Colorado swing district with a large Latino population, aired an anti-Trump commercial in English and Spanish. The ad is titled “Country First,” echoing the charge that those surrendering to Trump are putting party ahead of country. It is a moral stand—as well as a candidate's desperate effort to save himself.

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