Will these people never leave us alone? Researchers have released yet another brain-health study, this one finding that people who played a speed-training video game for a mere 23 hours dramatically reduced their risk of dementia — for up to two decades.
Oh, great! Just what I need. Another simple intervention I’m not doing. Arm day, leg day, and now, frontal lobe day.
Brain health has become the new microbiome, or maybe it’s the new protein, or fiber, or strength training, pickleball, breathwork, or longevity, or everything rolled into one hideous ball of self-improvement pressure.
If you’re not micro-dosing lithium orotate and your friends are — or if you haven’t even heard about the 2025 Harvard Medical School study, albeit in mice, that showed lithium could explain and treat Alzheimer’s — good luck to you.
My cognitive-improvement calendar is woefully empty. I’m not playing Sudoku, KenKen or Picross; I’m not searching for word patterns or participating in the fiber arts; I’m not relentlessly socializing, forcing my conversation on people for my own selfish reasons as they seek to flee.
Nothing can be done for pure pleasure anymore. I know one baby boomer who is taking drawing lessons mainly to improve his brain function, and another who is memorizing jokes for the same reason. I should be learning the piccolo, not to play the solo in Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” or anything, but for my frontal lobe.
Given life’s pace, it’s hard to fit it all in — to work, do laundry, to copy and paste two-factor authentication codes.
We need a multitasking game that trains your brain and also rewards knowledge of, say, the Epstein files. Here’s an idea: photos of global elites flash by on your screen, and you have to speed-click on those whose names surfaced on his plane’s flight manifest.
Or you’re given a list of presidents, academics, bankers, and philanthropists who claimed to have stopped socializing with the sexual predator before his 2008 conviction, and, from memory, you have to name those who were caught exchanging cozy emails with him years later.
Meanwhile, I never thought I’d see gingivitis as a blessing, but now that I know that flossing can also reduce the risk of dementia, I’m all in.
In case you missed it, in late January, the journal Stroke reported, “For every 14 individuals who floss ≥1/week, one fewer person will develop dementia.”
That’s all it takes — 14 people, and this whole individual- and family-destroying condition could be greatly reduced? Please, if you’re one of those 14 individuals, I am begging you, please, pull out that Glide.
Brain training is interfering with the very relationships we’re told to nurture on our brains’ behalf.
Last night I was supposed to meet friends for dinner at 6:30, but one had to push it to 7 because of a brain-training conflict (it was pickleball, which has rebranded to emphasize its cognition benefits); and another had to be home by 7:30 to give herself time to meditate, write in her gratitude journal, and make it to bed by 9 so she could play games on her phone and work on her processing speed.
Cognitive decline has, of course, entered the marital dance. A friend whose husband’s late parents had dementia has been nagging him to get in shape brain-wise. On a recent Tuesday, the spouse was proudly playing word games and drinking coffee, which, of course, was itself the subject of another recently released study, this one reporting that moderate consumption is linked to slower brain aging.
“No dementia for me until Wednesday at the earliest,” he texted.
The big question is: what training, if any, helps you in the real world? I mean, if the only thing you’re training your brain to do by playing Wordle is to play . . . Wordle, maybe we can skip it, guilt-free.
I put the question to George Rebok, a professor emeritus of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was involved in the recently released speed-training study, ACTIVE.
Rebok, who often wears a T-shirt with a brain on it — swag from a cognitive-aging conference — told me that “he gets this question a lot.”
And?
“It’s like asking if drugs work,” he said, allowing himself a chuckle. “Ya, they [can] work, but it depends on the condition, the dosage, there are a lot of factors. It’s not as simple as yes or no.”
It’s crucial to find a brain exercise you like, he said, or you’re not going to do it. “Do it with a friend so there’s a ‘memory buddy.’ ” Or get a personal trainer (yes, for your brain, and, alas, no telling yet whether the buff will flock to the specialty).
I still wasn’t sure whether all these brain games were nothing more than mind games, and when I asked Rebok for the name of a skeptic, but one who’s respected, he immediately directed me to Walter R. Boot, a geriatrics professor and associate director of the Center on Aging and Behavioral Research at Weill Cornell Medicine.
And you know, what? Bless Rebok for that, because right away Boot told me he was indeed skeptical.
“It is incredible, and not in a good way,” he said. “That 20 hours of an activity 20 years later could produce such a striking impact” — the study found the game could cut dementia risk by 25 percent — “seems implausible.”
Should I be embarrassed to admit that I was almost relieved to hear this? Obviously yes.
Moving on . . . “What I tell people,” he said, “is that cognitive health is shaped by many factors.”
He listed controllable lifestyle factors that may make a difference: learning new skills, spending time with friends, exercising, managing your blood pressure, staying engaged.
As far as the brain-training games, he said, “there is a lot of hype, and a lot of good science being done in this area, but in terms of translation from the lab to the real world, there are things we don’t know.”
But you know what we do know? That our fear of cognitive decline is being monetized. One forecast, by Towards HealthCare, a consulting firm based in Canada and India, projected the global “digital brain health market” would hit $478.53 billion by 2034.
Needless to say, dementia has been sucked into the wellness machine. A publication called Spavelous declared that we’re in a “new era of neuro-wellness spa innovation.”
“With the growing prevalence of dementia,” the publication reported with good cheer, “there is a rising demand for treatments aimed at mental wellness.”
Neuro-wellness at a high-end spa? Cue the White Lotus theme song.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.