‘Is Wordle a form of brain training? The answer’s no’

A little over two years ago, Harriet Kelsall, 51, began noticing that her aunt Norma, then 83, seemed to be slowing up. Tests soon showed that Norma was in the early stages of dementia – the umbrella term for debilitating conditions that include Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.

"I'm currently caring for her," says Harriet, who runs her own jewellery firm, HK Jewellery. "I've been watching this process over the last two years. It's a nightmare." Worse, she had seen it unfold before, with her grandmother. "We've got quite a bit of dementia in my family," she says.

The big question is: do puzzles or "brain training" games work? The evidence is, unhelpfully, confusing. Photo / Getty Images

According to the charity Dementia UK, the risk of developing dementia over the age of 80 is one in six and, though age is inescapable, about a third of dementia cases can be averted, with everything from good diet to staying socially active playing a part in delaying dementia or warding it off entirely.

Harriet had noticed one positive habit that seemed to play a part in staying healthy. "I was chatting to friends of my parents in their 90s who very much have all of their marbles and they do a sudoku puzzle every day to keep their brains in shape."

To Harriet, that made perfect sense. Her biochemist mother Jane – Norma's sister – had "always kept mentally in trim, lecturing", even in later life. "I look at the difference between them." According to Harriet, Jane recently "aced" a series of cognitive tests.

Now she is determined to follow the same path as her mother. "So I started doing first one sudoku a day, then two." Last year, along with so many of us, she added Wordle to her mental regimen, and then Quordle – which requires players to solve four Wordle-style puzzles at once. She also pits her wits against the word games Boggle and Bananagrams which, as someone who suffers from dyslexia, she finds particularly stretching.

"I feel it's good to do those against dementia as well," she says. "I just feel like it helps. I feel sharper and it inspires me to keep going. Because I know the next three decades are going to be critical in determining whether I develop dementia, especially watching what's happening to my aunt, and I'm aware of doing everything to keep my brain in shape."

Even Ellie, Harriet's 12-year-old daughter, is aware of what could be at stake. "She came to visit my aunt last month and was 'Oh gosh!' She's into all the word games as well and says she'll keep playing them to keep her brain in shape."

The big question is: do such puzzles or "brain training" games work? The evidence is, unhelpfully, confusing. Along with many of its other tips, Dementia UK emphasises that "taking part in hobbies, learning a new language, knitting, puzzles and listening to music… will stimulate different areas of the brain and help with attention and concentration".

One in six over-80s risk developing dementia, but some scientists believe stretching our cognitive skills can help stave off the condition. Photo / Getty Images

But Alzheimer's UK reports a mixed picture. "Some studies have found that cognitive training can improve some aspects of memory and thinking, particularly for people who are middle-aged or older," it notes. But "so far, no studies have shown that brain training prevents dementia".

Indeed, it warns: "People should be cautious if they find commercial packages that claim they can prevent or delay cognitive decline as the evidence for this is currently lacking. Recently, one of the leading providers of commercial brain training games was fined for making false claims about the benefits of their product."

That may be a reference to the US firm Lumosity, behind the computer "brain training" app Lumos Labs, which in 2016 paid a US$2 million (NZ$3.2m) fine levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the basis that it "deceived consumers with unfounded claims that Lumosity games can help users perform better at work and in school and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age".

Then the FTC's director of consumer protection, Jessica Rich, went so far as to say that "Lumosity preyed on consumers' fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia and even Alzheimer's disease. But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."

If the claims were too bold, the rewards on offer may explain why. The brain training market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion ($5.2b) in 2020 to $11.4 billion ($17.8b) by 2025 and $20 billion ($32.4b) by 2028.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should all chuck away our crosswords and sudokus, or even delete our brain-training apps.

A recent analysis of 215 clinical trials supported by America's National Institute on Ageing (NIA) showed that the "various cognitive training tools… can help older adults who are healthy or have mild cognitive impairment to improve cognitive health and perhaps their everyday functioning". Critically, it found that while the benefits were "modest in size", they affected both the healthy "and those with mild cognitive impairment. This may mean that some forms of cognitive training can help reduce or delay the development of cognitive impairment and dementia".

Indeed, the NIA is now funding a major trial of brain training software, ending in 2026, in an attempt to pin down the evidence once and for all. Meanwhile, here in Britain, a huge study called Protect, run in partnership with the NHS, is following thousands of people to find out, as lead researcher Professor Clive Ballard puts it: "which combination of [lifestyle] factors really work" in preventing or delaying dementia.

Dr Henry Mahncke says that when it comes to some brain training software, the jury is already in, and the verdict is positive. He is the CEO of BrainHQ, £6-a-month software behind 29 brain training exercises from the American company Posit Science, which he co-founded in 2002. The exercises are essentially based on those developed for the ACTIVE Study – one of the biggest research projects in the field in the last 20 years, funded by the US National Institutes of Health. According to the NIA, "the ACTIVE study proves that healthy older adults can make significant cognitive improvements with appropriate cognitive training and practice. It also demonstrates that Posit Science training drives improvements that are significantly better than other types of cognitive exercise."

Mahncke says puzzles, like crosswords, sudokus and The Telegraph's PlusWord game, "may be helpful, maybe not, they haven't been tested". For his own part, he says, "I don't think they're helpful." Rather, he thinks, the brain simply develops strategies to get better at each particular game. "People ask me, is Wordle a form of brain training? And the answer's no. We're not making the brain faster and more accurate." Instead, players just get better at Wordle. By contrast, he says, BrainHQ and brain training apps founded on research like the ACTIVE study, show "improved cognitive functions like speed, attention and memory".

BrainHQ games are deceptively simple, asking you to remember information on screen (like faces), or detect patterns, or spot objects that are revealed then quickly hidden. Each is adaptive, so that it gets harder as you improve. I find that as I try each, I improve, hit a threshold, and then fatigue quickly. It certainly can be draining.

Do puzzles like crosswords help your brain become sharper, or do you simply get better at crosswords? Photo / Getty Images

Mahncke says that constantly stretching users allows them not simply to maintain cognitive function, but to improve it too, just as working out allows gym bunnies to improve their physical condition. "We can deliver meaningful, real-world improvements to people's cognitive function," he says. "How much? Ten years of function, so people in their 70s were performing more like their 60s, while people in their 60s were performing like people in their 50s." His faith in such improvements explains why he doesn't think of brain training exclusively as a tool for those in midlife or old age. He says elite athletes looking for an edge also turn to similar techniques. Indeed, anyone looking to sharpen up.

"People say 'I've never had a good memory for faces' as if their brains are immutable and unchangeable. But they're just not." Of course, he concedes that there are other similarities to going to the gym: the effects wear off after a while if you stop training – though by no means immediately.

BrainHQ freely admits that "there is no surefire way to prevent dementia", whether caused by lack of blood flow to the brain (vascular dementia), genes (Huntington's disease) or, as in two thirds of cases, Alzheimer's. But the company points to research that keeping physically and mentally fit "might help delay dementia" or improve symptoms when they occur.

"The science shows us this," says Mahncke. "If you look at studies of who gets dementia, more and more, it seems like you can predict based on how you're doing in your middle age. In the same way that we would never say 'Don't bother exercising until you're 65', we're starting to think about brain health as a lifetime health issue from the moment we're born to the moment we take our final breath."

And when it comes to apps and software to mould, improve and heal the brain, he insists, we are only at the beginning of the journey. Brain training, he says, is not just warding off the obvious signs of dementia, like failing memory. "Over time we or somebody else are going to customise these training programmes and be able to help virtually every neurological and psychiatric disease," he says. That's because, he says, from depression to stroke, nimble brains are more robust at recovering.

“Brain plasticity can rewire our brains in helpful ways against these intractable conditions. That’s very exciting.”