Playing video games can delay mental decay

Older people who play video games challenging their mental processing speed could delay the ageing of their minds, a new study has found. According to the researchers, elderly people who played just 10 hours of a game priming their mental processing speed and skills, delayed declines by as many as seven years in a range of cognitive skills. "We know that we can stop this decline and actually restore cognitive processing speed to people," Fredric Wolinsky, professor in the UI College of Public Health and lead author on the paper said.      "So, if we know that, shouldn't we be helping people? It's fairly easy, andolder folks can go get the training game and play it," he said. The study comes amid a burst of research examining why, as we age, our minds gradually lose 'executive function', generally considered mission control for critical mental activities, such as memory, attention, perception and problem solving. ANI