You’ve probably did them, brain exercises. Did
you feel smarter afterwards? Scientists found out that it is indeed no more
than a ‘feel’. The exercises create no more than a placebo effect.
Your brain’s lies
The placebo
effect is a common thing in for example drugs and surgeries. People feel better
when they take pills if they believe if the pill works, regardless if the pill
actually works or not. People can even get drunk of water if they’re told that
it’s vodka. This is also the reason that there’s always a control group in
experiments with medicine. With this control group, scientist can compare the
control group, that only experiences the placebo effect, and the real test
group, that also experiences the advantage from the new medicine. With this,
the researchers can determine if their new drugs actually helps. But now
scientists have discovered that the placebo effect also occurs when you do
brain games.
Misleading posters
 |
| The used posters for the programmes |
Industry on its back
Because
almost everybody wants to be smarter, brain games are really popular. Who doesn’t
want to have higher grades, a better degree or a better paying job? There’s a billion-dollar
industry behind brain exercises, which now seems to be based on a lie. Cyrus
Foroughi and his team advice the brain game industry to ‘temper their claims’.
But does this make the discovery of the placebo here only bad? No, it serves as
a great starting point for new studies about how far the placebo effect can go,
how much it can improve somebody’s IQ if somebody believes he or she is doing
an exercise that improves the IQ. This can learn us a lot more about how our
brains work, and on top of that, if you believe that brain exercises work, they’ll
work for you!
Click here to read more about biology!
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Great that you want to comment! Please write something relevant and non-offending.