Team finds training exercise that boosts brain power

Well get a fucking protocol written up so stroke survivors can use it.  Not doing so is incompetence of the highest order, requiring firing.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-10-team-boosts-brain-power.html

EEGs taken before and after the training showed that the biggest changes occurred in the brains of the group that trained using the "dual n-back" method. Credit: Kara J. Blacker/JHU

One of the two brain-training methods most scientists use in research is significantly better in improving memory and attention, Johns Hopkins University researchers found. It also results in more significant changes in brain activity.

Though this exercise didn't make anyone smarter, it greatly improved skills people need to excel at school and at work. These results, published this week by the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, suggest it's possible to train the brain like other body parts—with targeted workouts.
"People say cognitive training either works or doesn't work. We showed that it matters what kind of training you're doing," said lead author Kara J. Blacker, a former Johns Hopkins post-doctoral fellow in psychological and brain sciences. "This one task seems to show the most consistent results and the most impact on performance and should be the one we focus on if we're interested in improving cognition through training."
Scientists trying to determine if brain exercises improve cognitive performance have had mixed luck. Johns Hopkins researchers suspected the problem wasn't the idea of brain training, but the type of exercise researchers chose to test it. They decided to compare directly the leading types of exercises and measure people's brain activity before and after training; that had never been attempted before, according to Blacker, now a researcher at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for Advancement of Military Medicine Inc.
First, the team assembled three groups of participants, all young adults. Everyone took an initial battery of cognitive tests to determine baseline working memory, attention and intelligence. Everyone also got an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity. Then, everyone was sent home to practice a computer task for a month. One group used one leading brain exercise while the second group used the other. The third group practiced on a control task.
The training programs Johns Hopkins compared are not the commercial products available sold to consumers, but tools scientists rely on to test the brain's working memory.
Everyone trained five days a week for 30 minutes, then returned to the lab for another round of tests to see if anything about their brain or cognitive abilities had changed.