According to a recent study, playing video games could reduce your risk of dementia by 25%. This may not sound like medicine.
The purpose of the game Double Decision is to increase brain processing speed, which governs how quickly we process and respond to information. Although this ability tends to deteriorate with age, it is also a crucial indicator of cognitive impairment that may point to a higher chance of dementia.
In the game, a road sign appears at the edge, surrounded by distracting visuals, and a car briefly lights up on the screen. Both must be recognized by the player.
Double Decision was created in the 1990s by US researchers to help older drivers process information more quickly. A 2010 study that included 908 drivers and was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that just ten hours of practice reduced their crash rate by half over the following six years.
Nearly 3,000 people over 65 were divided into three groups for a groundbreaking new study. Each group trained a particular brain capacity, such as memory, logic, or processing speed (i.e., playing Double Decision). For five to six weeks, each of the three groups trained twice a week for about an hour. After 11 and 35 months, around half of each group underwent four booster sessions.
Twenty years after the brain training concluded, researchers examined the individuals’ medical records.
According to the results, which were just published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, people in the Double Decision group who had booster sessions had a 25% lower chance of receiving a dementia diagnosis than people in any other group.
The purpose of the game Double Decision is to increase brain processing speed, which governs how quickly we process and respond to information. Although this ability tends to deteriorate with age, it is also a crucial indicator of cognitive impairment.
One reason the speed training was so effective, according to Professor Marilyn Albert, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine in the US, is because the game became more difficult as a player got better.
The brain was constantly being stretched as more distracting indicators were introduced and images came and disappeared more quickly. In contrast, the groups performing reasoning (interpreting patterns to predict what would happen next) and memory tasks (remembering things on a list) did not adjust and became more challenging.
Professor Albert claims that Double Decision increased “brain plasticity,” or the brain’s capacity to reorganize itself in response to experience and learning.
This can thicken myelin, the fatty layer that surrounds nerve fibers and facilitates the rapid transmission of signals throughout the brain, and enhance already-existing connections between brain cells.
According to her, “the outcome is stronger brain networks that resist the effects of developing dementia and faster, more accurate neural processing.”
According to her, speed training in particular may help maintain acetylcholine, a chemical messenger essential for learning, memory, and attention that drastically declines in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
Using specialized brain scans, earlier research—published in JMIR Serious Games in 2025—found that speed-training increased cholinergic activity in memory and attention-related brain regions, correcting the equivalent of about ten years of age-related decrease.
Other experts, however, emphasize that Double Decision (which is free on the BrainHQ app, available on the App Store for iPhone or Google Play for Android) is not necessarily the only software with these advantages.
‘Any form of activity that challenges the brain can help make it more resilient to dementia,’ says Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge.
She did, in fact, participate in research that was released in 2017 for a game called Wizard, in which players must remember where patterns appeared on the screen. As players get better, the game gets harder. It is intended to target the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that is most affected by Alzheimer’s.
P atients with early cognitive decline (a precursor to Alzheimer’s) who played for eight hours over four weeks boosted their memory scores by around 40 per cent and made a third fewer errors, reported the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Another brain-boosting game is Decoder, also developed by Professor Sahakian, which is said to train the brain’s frontal-parietal network – the area responsible for focus and problem-solving – by asking players to decode number sequences against the clock.
A 2019 study of healthy young adults found those who played it for eight hours over a month showed significantly improved attention and concentration.
And Lumosity, made up of dozens of short games targeting memory, attention and processing speed, was studied in 2015. Compared to a control group that completed crosswords, those who used it for ten weeks showed greater improvement on conventional cognitive tests. (However, in order to resolve US regulatory allegations that it had deceived consumers by implying that its games may postpone cognitive decline, the company behind Lumosity agreed to pay $2 million (£1.6 million) in 2016.)
These brain-boosting games can all be downloaded for free or with a nominal subscription from the App Store or Google Play.
All brain-training games, according to Gill Livingston, a professor of psychiatry of older people at University College London, could be a part of a larger strategy for brain health, along with blood pressure management, exercise, social interaction, and assessments of hearing and vision, but they are not a stand-alone solution. “They should be used as part of a strategy for a healthier brain; that is the same verdict for all of them.”
As for the latest research, she notes that only 105 of the 512 originally assigned to play Double Decision completed the booster sessions – a relatively small number, which makes it hard to rule out that those who stuck with it were simply more health conscious which might also have lowered their dementia risk.
