Three times a week 86-year-old Chai Suet-chun goes grocery shopping, folds laundry and orders dim sum. It might sound like a busy schedule for someone her age, but Chai doesn’t need to expend much physical energy to complete the tasks. It’s her brain, not her body, that does the work. Since 2016, Chai has been a regular player of a series of brain-training games developed by the Hong Kong Society for the Aged. Designed to help slow the process of cognitive decline among older adults, the games train five key areas: memory , hand-eye coordination, attention, mental arithmetic and judgment. “I like playing the grocery shopping game very much,” Chai says. “The games are useful in training my memory and hand-eye coordination, and they are entertaining – I feel happier than before.” The games mirror everyday tasks. Players buy fruit at the supermarket, memorise phone numbers and match pairs of socks. “The games are designed with cultural relevance to the elderly in Hong Kong,” says the programme’s occupational therapist, Wilson Wong Wai-sang. “The content and design are what they are familiar with.” How to grow older but not fatter: weights, steps, vegetables They also help to increase social engagement, which is especially important as we age. “Because groups of people play the games together in our centre, it encourages them to communicate with other people,” says Pinky Wong Hoi-ki, manager of the Hong Kong Society for the Aged Fong Shu Chuen Centre. Cognitive decline is a normal part of the ageing process. The brain becomes smaller with age and minor changes in memory and thinking skills are common. “Our processing speed is slower compared with when we are young and the capacity for multitasking deteriorates,” says Professor Linda Lam Chiu-wa, principal investigator of the Simon KY Lee Foundation’s Active Prevention and Early Detection of Cognitive Impairment Project. So strong is people’s desire to slow cognitive decline that the brain training industry is forecast to exceed US$8 billion by 2021 – up from US$2 billion in 2016. Games such as Lumosity , which boasts 75 million users globally, promise to improve memory and increase focus in just a few minutes every day. New research supports the hype. A study published in September in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America looked at data from Lumosity’s “Ebb and Flow” game, which assesses users’ ability to switch between two tasks. It found that with a lot of practice, some older adults were able to improve their performance to levels equal to people many decades younger. “In terms of the ageing effects, what it showed us is that older and younger people process tasks in a similar way, and with increased practice you will get better activation of the task,” says co-author Professor Frini Karayanidis from the University of Newcastle in Australia. “We found that after playing 60 games, the older people [aged 71-80] did not quite reach the same level of competence as the younger people. We then compared a subset of older people who played up to 1,000 games to younger people who played up to 60 games. What is really interesting is a large proportion of the older people started performing like younger people.” Karayanidis says the performance of one-quarter of the older people equalled people 20 years younger and one-half equalled people 10 years younger. A smaller number performed as well as people aged between 20 and 30. There is, however, one important caveat: there is little evidence that playing brain-training games improves anything other than, well, your ability to play brain-training games. “If you are practising a particular set of games, the evidence at the moment is that you will improve on those particular tasks,” Karayanidis says. “There is very weak evidence that playing lots of brain-training games may have any generalisation in terms of your ability to, for example, drive a car or continue to cook in your 90s.” Lam agrees. “You train to have better memory, for example, within the context of a game, and it has nothing to do with your ability to do things outside that context.” But research continues and Karayanidis says it is reasonable to conclude that “maintaining engagement of your brain through these tasks or indeed other tasks may maintain your ability to do these tasks”. Which makes brain training games that focus on practical, everyday tasks like shopping and laundry even more appealing.