Memory Is a High Rating Topic

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday October 17, 2013
It's not often that non-sport TV programs get seen and discussed by older men. But in the past few days I've noticed one that has become the topic of the tea-room, the boardroom and the garden fence. It has hit an underground concern that is troubling our increasingly aging population.

The program is Redesign My Brain presented by Todd Sampson on the ABC and last Thursday it shot the station to third place, with the program beating The Beauty and the Geek, Law & Order, and Big Brother. Nationally it drew 865,000 viewers.

Now why is such a minor local documentary pulling in so many over-40s men, and women too, and getting them all to talk to each other? Perhaps it is the realisation that many of us are no longer as smart and as quick as we were.

In fact both men and women decline 3.9 per cent in brain function between 45-49. And by 65-70 men have lost 9.6 per cent in mental reasoning power, women 7.4 per cent. So after the umpteenth time of misplacing the car keys or going out without the shopping list, Mum and Dad are getting a bit concerned.

Well they are not alone. The world-wide trend in "brain health" is booming. Books, software, pills and vitamins, foods and exercises; a research group called SharpBrains estimates that the brain training software alone was worth more than $1 billion in 2012 and will reach $6 billion by 2020.

It seems that after all these years of working on our abs and our biceps, our attention is shifting up to the control room. This has been spurred along by a more intense research of what happens when we do apply an exercise regime to the grey cells. And although the scientists don't all agree on quantities of improvement, they do agree that there is one.

A number of training programs have emerged, with the kind of exercises that Sampson has been demonstrating. The seriousness of the perceived market is illustrated by multi-billion dollar drug company Bayer partnering brain-trainer Cognifit, and Merck picking CogState. Like many analysts, they foresee a time when brain training exercises are as much a part of your daily health routine as taking the vitamin pills and fish oil.

Does brain training ultimately make you more intelligent? There's still a lot of debate about that, but there's no argument that it makes you better at what you train for. Sampson was taught to memorise a whole pack of playing cards. You or I could barely manage seven cards in a row. Reaction-recognition helped him rapidly spot things with his peripheral vision. Like any bodily function the rule is "use it or lose it".

It makes us wonder about our children, too. In these days of instantly-accessed information they no longer spend hours at school training their mental arithmetic. They no longer need to spell, the computer does it for them. And if you cast back to great-grandad's time, they no longer have to memorise The Boy Stood On the Burning Deck and recite it to the class.

But perhaps these redundant skills did more for the brain - and the person - than just handle a few facts and figures. Are we risking their brains going marshmallow like their fast foods and canned-laughter TV?

Redesign My Brain is on ABC tonight at 8:30, watch it and make up your own mind about your mind.