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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
I spent dozens of hours as a kid playing this game.
- [00:04]
Nintendo Advertiser
Exercise your mind with Brain Age, a new game for Nintendo ds. By investing just minutes a day, you can help keep your mind sharp.
- [00:13]
Phil Agnew
That's certainly what I hoped. I played a game day after day, hooked on its puzzles, desperately trying to reduce my brain age. I'm not alone. I've spoken to dozens of other individuals who agree.
- [00:25]
Everyday Player
I feel like this game could positively impact my memory. I think games like this help keep your memory active. Yes, I definitely, I definitely do think playing this game regularly could influence your mental sharpness.
- [00:36]
Phil Agnew
And yet Professor Dan Simons thinks we're all wrong.
- [00:39]
Professor Dan Simons
I have no idea what brain age is supposed to even mean or how you'd measure it. There was no neuroscience involved in this, really. And what we found was that the vast majority of these companies didn't cite anything that was real.
- [00:51]
Phil Agnew
So does Nintendo Brain Training work well? In today's episode, I find out. First, I analyze the dozens of ads Nintendo aired for millions of dollars. I share the psychological nudges, the they used to persuade us and how they made their games so popular. Then I run my own experiment. For five days, I play Nintendo Brain Training. I record my progress and measure if my intelligence actually improved after a week. And finally, I chat with Professor Dan Simmons to hear why he thinks so many people like me were lured into Brain Training's claims. All of that coming up in today's episode of Nudge.
- [01:32]
Natalie Gingrich
The Ops Authority, hosted by Natalie Gingrich, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Every week on the Ops Authority, you'll hear transformational stories of powerhouse business owners who value business operations. You can't ignore the back end pieces that have to work together and flow smoothly to build a brand, grow a community, or disrupt an industry. If the operations side of your business is a mess, putting putting out fires will always take priority, leaving no room for the behavioral science improvements that I think every business needs to make. So listen to the Ops Authority wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:13]
Phil Agnew
Back in 2006, a new game making big claims was taking the world by storm.
- [02:19]
News Reporter
A new game claims to be able to make us smarter by exercising our brains. Tonight, we put it to the fame or shame test. There's a new brain game in town. Brain Age is a new game for the Nintendo DS that claims to train your brain in minutes a day. Players use voice recognition and the DS touchscreen stylus to navigate a medley of math and memory exercises. Nintendo says it increases the blood flow to your Brain.
- [02:47]
Phil Agnew
To many, this sounded a little far fetched. Video games can't make us smarter. But it wasn't Nintendo making these claims. It was Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Kawashima.
- [02:59]
News Reporter
That's the theory anyway, of a Japanese neurologist whose animated character virtually guides players through each game while including clever messages.
- [03:08]
Phil Agnew
Astute nudge listeners will know that Nintendo has leveraged a very smart bias here. It is the authority bias. We're unlikely to believe Nintendo telling us that brain age improves our intelligence, but will be more likely to believe it if we're told it by a neurologist like Dr. Kawashima, especially a doctor who reportedly turned down all royalties for the game. Authority bias helped persuade people to buy. But of course it wasn't the only bias they were using. They also used a very intelligent bit of the brain age players.
- [03:39]
News Reporter
Brain age is determined by their speed and accuracy. The perfect score 20 years old.
- [03:45]
Phil Agnew
If you repeatedly play the game, you can slowly bring down your brain age to that magic age. 20 years old. I remember when I was younger I was really obsessed with my brain age. I was returning to the game day after day desperately trying to lower my brain age. Nintendo knew this would hook users like me in it acts as an anchor and it helped users measure their progress and provided dopamine inducing rewards for repeat players. The more you play, the lower your brain age drops. But that is just the start. Nintendo packed their ads with smart uses of different nudges to persuade us to play. One of their first ads used the negativity bias. It's the idea that we're drawn to negative or upsetting stories. The ad showed two old school friends meeting with one of them experiencing a senior moment. How long has it been?
- [04:37]
Professor Dan Simons
Honey?
- [04:37]
Phil Agnew
Is my old buddy David. We went to high school together. Honey, this is. Do you often forget things? Now you could do something about it. Just a few simple exercises per day can help keep your brain in shape. It's very cliche, but these types of ads are effective. We pay attention to negative traits and we remember them. In a 1991 study by Felicia Prater at Berkeley, participants were twice as likely to remember negative personality traits compared to positive personality traits from a given list. Nintendo benefited from this bias. Viewers remembered the ad and remembered that the brain training game can help because of the negativity bias. But there is a problem with Nintendo's approach. Most of us don't intuitively believe companies claims we don't want to be told what to do. Many will not believe Nintendo's claim that the game Will increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex and boost our memory. Nintendo have to say that they are selling the game, so we don't believe them by default. To avoid this problem, Nintendo very quickly started to create adverts where they interviewed everyday players and asked them to share why they liked the game.
- [05:54]
Everyday Player
I enjoy brain training because I really need it. I think on the days I use the ds, I remember things better, like where did you leave your keys? Where did you put things down? It just seems to wake up the brain. It's very convenient because you can slip it in your handbag, you can do it on a plane, you can do it in a car. On the days that I do the brain training, I am sharper.
- [06:13]
Phil Agnew
We don't like being told what to do. If a company says playing this game will improve your memory, we experience reactance. This is a. A cognitive bias that makes us resistant to someone's attempt to influence our behaviour. A 2023 study titled Don't Tell Me How Much to Tip showcases reactants very nicely. The researchers found that added a suggested tip amount to a restaurant bill, reduced people's rating of the restaurant by 8% and didn't even increase tips. These Nintendo ads with everyday players removed that reactance. It's not Nintendo saying that the game makes you sharper. It's an Aussie housewife. This makes the message more persuasive. But Nintendo quickly learned that the ads could be far more persuasive if they showed celebrities played the game. Celebrities like Julie Walters and Patrick Stewart.
- [07:03]
Everyday Player
What's this one now?
- [07:04]
Phil Agnew
16. 32. Brain training. 5. 25.
- [07:09]
Everyday Player
Stop showing off.
- [07:11]
Phil Agnew
7 is 8. 8.
- [07:13]
Everyday Player
Let mummy have a go.
- [07:14]
Phil Agnew
6.
- [07:14]
Everyday Player
Come on.
- [07:16]
Another Everyday Player
8.
- [07:16]
Everyday Player
Sevens 56. 6.
- [07:19]
Phil Agnew
Are you so good at this or Nicole Kidman?
- [07:23]
Everyday Player
Let's have a look here. Bet I can do better than that.
- [07:26]
Nintendo Advertiser
Let's go.
- [07:30]
Phil Agnew
6.
- [07:31]
Professor Dan Simons
Come on.
- [07:33]
Phil Agnew
Brain training and mere brain training. A lane for Nintendo ds. Nintendo even got Kate Hudson involved.
- [07:41]
Everyday Player
Things move pretty fast on set. I mean, most of the time. But when the cameras are rolling, I'm in the zone. Because when I'm on top of my game, nothing breaks me out of character.
- [07:53]
Phil Agnew
Correct.
- [07:53]
Everyday Player
Hi, Mousey.
- [07:55]
Nintendo Advertiser
Help improve your concentration in minutes a.
- [07:57]
Phil Agnew
Day with fun exercises specifically designed to.
- [08:00]
Nintendo Advertiser
Help you focus in today's distracted world.
- [08:02]
Phil Agnew
And Ronan Keating. Yellow, black, blue, Blue.
- [08:07]
Natalie Gingrich
Oh, red.
- [08:09]
Phil Agnew
1, 2, 7.
- [08:13]
Nintendo Advertiser
39.
- [08:15]
Phil Agnew
Not bad. Brain training only on Nintendo DS. Nintendo found the magic formula with these ads. They avoided reactance, making viewers far more accepting of the message. And by using celebrities, they also benefited from the Halo Effect. The Halo effect means we automatically assume a person with one good quality to have similar good qualities in unrelated areas. So we know Nicole Kidman and Patrick Stewart are talented actors, so we assume they are good at picking worthwhile video games to play. We know Ronan Keating and Kate Hudson are great singers, which leads us to assume that their talent might be linked to the Nintendo Brain Training game that they're playing. These ads really became the silver bullet for Nintendo. Each of these type of ads with the celebrities and the Halo effect and the removed reactants, well, they increased sales dramatically. Unsurprisingly, these celebrity endorsement adverts quickly became the only ads Brain Training produced. Here is one of the first ads Nintendo Brain Training aired. What we now know about reactants and Halo Effect it's fairly obvious to see why one of these really early ads was pulled from air after just a few months.
- [09:27]
Voiceover Narrator
Studies show that cognitive exercises can stimulate your mind through increased blood flow to the brain. A prominent video game company has come up with a way to make exercise in your brain easy. It's called Brain Age. Train your brain in minutes a day and you play it on the Nintendo ds. The idea is that by performing a few daily mental exercises, you can help sharpen your mind. To learn more about brain age, visit brainage.com Brain Age is rated E for everyone.
- [09:55]
Phil Agnew
Most viewers ignored this ad and Nintendo canned it within weeks. It failed because it triggered reactance and disbelief. However, there was one earlier Brain Age ad that I quite liked.
- [10:07]
Nintendo Advertiser
Do you remember what you had for dinner two nights ago? Exercise your mind with Brain Age, a new game for Nintendo ds. By investing just minutes a day, you can help keep your mind sharp. Over time, you'll progress toward your ideal brain age within the game. Imagine feeling like you're ready to take on the world. Train your brain in minutes a day with Brain Age only for Nintendo ds. Rated E for everyone.
- [10:33]
Phil Agnew
I liked the question at the start of this ad asking, do you remember what you had for dinner two weeks ago? Well, that's quite smart. The question encourages viewers to pay attention. Rohini Aliwalia and Robert Brantcrank's study in 2004 revealed that ads which use questions are rated 14% more favorably than statement based ads. But I think the problem with this ad is that Nintendo tried to cram too much in. They had the question, but they also absolutely packed it with detail. Compared to the Halo effect celebrity ads, these ads just weren't as effective. The celebrity endorsed ads made Nintendo Brain Training famous and they changed my opinion. They made me when I was younger, wholeheartedly believe that brain training games would make me sharper and smarter. But perhaps I'm a sucker for marketing, perhaps I'm very easily swayed. Did the general public really believe that brain training worked well? To find out, I got in touch with the folks at voxpop Me. Voxpop Me helps brands and agencies have conversations with lots of customers using video surveys. Over 5 million videos have been captured on Voxpopme. And it really is an incredibly fast and easy way to ask thousands of people a question and get informative, qualitative results. It's also where Tom from the Charles Duhigg episode works. We got chatting after that call and he suggested I use voxpop Me on this show, which I think really shows how effective that Fast Friends procedure actually was. So using Voxpop Me, I showed 25 British people an old advert for brain training and asked them if they'd used games like this before. The majority said they had.
- [12:12]
Everyday Player
I have actually played that exact game.
- [12:14]
Phil Agnew
I have played games like this and I would play games like this in the future.
- [12:18]
Everyday Player
I'm always using games like this.
- [12:20]
Another Everyday Player
So, I mean, I would consider using a game like this. And I've used kind of like brain training before in the past as a, like a fun thing to do to see your brain age and see if you can get your brain age younger and things like that.
- [12:31]
Everyday Player
I would and have considered using a game like this.
- [12:36]
Phil Agnew
Most Brits had played it, but do they believe what Nintendo claims? Do they think it improves their mental sharpness?
- [12:44]
Everyday Player
I do think that playing this game regularly could influence your mental sharpness. I think a game like this would be good to, like, catch you up with maths or just the stuff you've learned through education that you don't tend to really use anymore, so you're not remembering it as much. So if you find yourself improving and you think your memory is improving day to day, then I think playing that game could definitely influence mental sharpness. I'm currently on maternity leave, so I'm not really testing my brain or mental state very much at the moment. So doing something like this would definitely keep me Sharp.
- [13:26]
Phil Agnew
Of the 25 people we asked, 24 said Nintendo Brain training would keep their minds sharp. One person said they weren't sure and no one said it wouldn't help. But keeping your mind sharp is a little vague. What about something more specific? What about memory? Do the general British public think brain training could improve their memory?
- [13:47]
Everyday Player
So I think playing those sorts of games would be really, really beneficial for my memory. And I'd like to think they try and help me remember and retain more information as well. So I think games like this can help with your memory. I think it's healthy for your brain to do games like this. I think games like this will impact your memory, to keep it sharp and obviously work muscles in your brain that maybe you don't normally use.
- [14:12]
Phil Agnew
I think playing games like Brain Age would help you to remember more.
- [14:16]
Everyday Player
I think games like this might maybe.
- [14:19]
Phil Agnew
Make it a bit easier to remember things.
- [14:21]
Everyday Player
So I think things like this, games like this are really quite important to help better memory. I think games like this help keep your memory active.
- [14:31]
Another Everyday Player
I think they will help with the memory things because games that kind of make you actively recall things kind of spike parts of your brain that you. You probably don't use too much and it's good for things like memory.
- [14:41]
Everyday Player
I think games like this impact your memory in a positive way. I think games like this can positively impact your memory.
- [14:52]
Phil Agnew
Out of the 25 Brits, 13 said brain games definitely improve memory. 10 said they would help to some extent and just 2 said they weren't sure. Again, nobody said these games wouldn't help. The voxpopme survey has confirmed what I thought. The vast majority of us genuinely believe that Nintendo brain training works. It keeps our mind sharp, it improves our memory, and if it works for all those celebrities, then it must work for us. But is that true? Do these brain training games actually help? Is Dr. Kawashima's game based on hard evidence or marketing fluff? Have we all been persuaded by psychology inspired ads rather than real science? Well, to find out, I spoke to an expert in marketing, deception and cognitive science, Dan Simons. Dan's a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. He's a New York Times bestseller and he studied these brain training games.
- [15:48]
Professor Dan Simons
So the idea of brain training was really exciting. The idea that you could practice this game, this task that's maybe not terribly exciting in and of itself, but that it would improve your basic cognitive abilities. The idea that doing a visual search task over and over again is somehow going to improve your attention in the world. It's going to make you a better driver, it's going to help you improve your performance in schools. This was a really potent idea. That was the promise of the brain training idea was that doing these simple tasks that tap into sort of basic cognitive abilities would somehow improve those abilities in a general way that would then let you use those abilities in all of these other contexts when they're important.
- [16:29]
Phil Agnew
Like Dan says, brain training was exciting because players Presumed that these games would improve their performance in all aspects of their life. Their memory would improve, their minds would station sharp. Players won't forget their old friends names or what they had for dinner two nights ago. But Dan, who knows the science behind cognitive training was always suspicious of Nintendo's claims.
- [16:52]
Professor Dan Simons
It was a radical idea from the cognitive training end of things because we've known for over a hundred years now that training tends to be really narrow and specific. If you practice a task, you get better at that task with those materials. And changing the materials, you might not show any benefit. If you practice memorizing numbers and get really, really good and you're able to recall a 50 digit number, you might not be any better at recalling playing cards than if you just started. It doesn't necessarily generalize, it's really narrow. So these claims were an example of a potentially really exciting effect. Something generalizing from a simple, relatively simple task, relatively simple experiences, to a broad experience. It was a big phase, right? So you had Nintendo Brain Age massive selling program claiming that hey, do these tasks and you're increasing or reducing your brain age. I have no idea what brain age is supposed to even mean or how you'd measure it. There was no neuroscience involved in this really. But what they basically did was show that if you did these tasks, you got better at those tasks and then they gave you a lower number of your brain age.
- [18:00]
Phil Agnew
Yet Dan wasn't sure if Nintendo had really invented a magic game that did what it claimed. Maybe their specific brain training tasks could generalise and help improve our memory and keep our minds sharp. Well, to find out, Dan ran studies on all the brain training claims. Find out the results of those studies after this short break.
- [18:21]
Natalie Gingrich
Once on holiday, a local asked me to explain what marketing actually is and I struggled. How do you even begin to describe marketing? You have to generate leads, you have to score leads, you have to contact leads, you have to create content, you have to gather data and the next day you'll need to do it all again. And you wonder if it's even working. It's clear that marketers are spread far too thin trying to do so many different things. But HubSpot really can help. With the help of Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools and features like Content Remix can really help. With Content Remix, you can turn one piece of content into a suite of assets. With HubSpot, you can also pinpoint the best prospects with a predictive lead scoring system. And you can level up your campaign's KPIs with their new analytics suite so your day to day becomes less busy work and more driving revenue through the roof. Even if all of that won't actually help me explain what marketing is. Visit HubSpot.com marketers to learn more.
- [19:25]
Phil Agnew
Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew so let's hand back to Dan. He's studied these brain training claims. Were they genuine?
- [19:33]
Professor Dan Simons
And it turns out we did a review of of that entire literature of all of the major brain training companies and the claims that they cited as evidence for their claims, the scientific findings that they cited as evidence for their claims that they posted on their websites as support for their products. And what we found was that first, the vast majority of these companies didn't cite anything that was real. Many of them cited non peer reviewed work. And when they did cite peer reviewed work, often it had nothing to do with their product. But when it did have something to do with their product, there was almost no evidence for far transfer. There was almost no evidence that you did anything other than get better at the thing you were doing.
- [20:11]
Phil Agnew
Dan writes in his book the Invisible Gorilla how the largest experiment on brain Training randomly assigned 2,832 seniors to one of four a verbal memory training group, a problem solving group, a processing speed group, and a control group that did no cognitive training. In the experiment, each group practiced one particular task for 10 sessions of an hour each, spread out over six weeks and after the training, their performance was tested both on a set of laboratory tasks and some real world tasks. The hope was that the training on cognitive tasks would help keep their brain sharp, leading to improvements on other cognitive tasks and on real world functioning things like remembering someone's name and what you had for dinner two nights ago. However, this is not what happened. The improvements were limited to the specific tasks they had practiced. The important point was the improvements did not carry over to non trained laboratory tasks. Practicing Sudokus and maths puzzles buys you almost nothing for your processing speed or memory. Nintendo brain training won't help you remember that old school friend's name.
- [21:18]
Professor Dan Simons
My view for the brain training games is if you enjoy playing the games and you think they're fun and you like getting better at them, go for it. If you like doing crossword puzzles and you get better at crossword puzzles, go for it. That's fine. But don't assume that doing crossword puzzles is going to stave off cognitive aging, because it's not. It's just going to make you better at doing crossword puzzles and other things that maybe use the same vocabulary words.
- [21:40]
Phil Agnew
I believe Dan, he's got a lot of evidence to back up his points. It is extremely unlikely that a simple brain training game where you quickly complete sums would dramatically improve processing speed or memory. And yet there was still a little part of me that wasn't sure. Maybe it's a bit of confirmation bias. I played a lot of these games as a kid and I always believed they worked. It's hard to change that opinion, but it's also the opinion of the general public. 24 out of the 25 people I surveyed said these games do keep your mind sharp. So I decided to run my own experiment. I wanted to see if Nintendo brain training would make me smarter. My experiment was very, very simple. I'd play Brain training on the Nintendo DS for five days every day. I'd do the quick training task, which is designed, according to Dr. Kawashima in the game, to improve my prefrontal cortex. Before my experiment began, I played chess against an AI to gauge my mental sharpness. And then at the end of the five days, I'd play another game of chess and see if all that brain training actually helped. So here's me on day one of the brain training experiment. Alright, today I am playing my first game of chess and this is to assess my intelligence level, I guess. Well, some form of intelligence. I'm gonna be playing an AI called Jimmy on Chess.com. jimmy's I think, quite easy to play. I don't play chess very often at all really. I've played it a bit in the past, but I can't have played more than five, six, seven maybe games over the last 12 months. So I'm not very good. But I'm gonna play this AI called Jimmy who says he'll adapt and make it a little easier or harder. Depending on how I play. I should win because this person is. This AI is not very good. But I'm more interested in engaging the accuracy level of my place. So if my accuracy level is really high, it suggests I'm playing a very high level and perhaps that my cognitive ability is quite impressive. If my accuracy level is quite low, then I guess it suggests that I could do a bit of brain training. Okay, well, here goes. This will be my first game of chess. I'll let you know how I get on. I played the AI Jimmy at chess and I think the AI definitely adapted to my awful playing style. It made it a little easier for me and eventually letting me win. But I wasn't really interested in the Result. I wanted to know my accuracy score. Let's see how I did. I got an accuracy score of 70.7. Obviously, the higher, the better. The start of my game wasn't very good. I made some blunders, four misses, and didn't make any brilliant or great moves. So I think I can get better. I don't think that's particularly good. My accuracy score was 70.7. I made one blunder, had four misses, and had no brilliant or great moves. Now it was time to start my five days of brain training. Let's see if it actually improves my cognitive ability in the way that so many of us believe. Okay, it's time for some brain training. So every day for the next five days, I'm gonna do quick brain training. And this is gonna hopefully improve my mental capacity and potentially make me a better chess player. So let's do quick training now. And so this is what the game says to me. It says, now I'll explain the training that you use to improve your brain activity. You look at the problems that appear on screen. So these are math, mathematical problem. So it gives an example of seven plus one, and you have to write the answer. Eight sounds easy, doesn't it? You write the answers as fast as you can. Solving problems quickly will activate your prefrontal cortex. Okay, ready? Let's go. All right, let's train my brain one times nine. That's nine. The game didn't take long. There are about 20 fairly simple sums. One that I embarrassingly got wrong, but after two minutes, I was done. And seven minus four is three. So let's look at my results. Time used one minute 51 seconds penalty. So I got one wrong. Unfortunately, that's a penalty of 5 seconds. And so my total time was 1 minute 56. And brain training is saying I performed at a walking speed. And to rub it in, it's got a little animation of a man walking quite slowly. So that's day one. Not very impressive. Just walking speed. Let's see how I did on day two. Okay, how did I get on time used? One minute 35. One miss. So I've got a penalty of five seconds. Total of one minute 40 this time. So still at walking speed, but an improvement on yesterday. So still walking speed, but getting a little better. How about day three? Okay, how do. How do. How do. Still walking speed. One minute 20. That is faster. I'm getting faster, but still too slow. Completing those sums in one minute and 20 seconds is a big improvement. But day four was even better. Five, four, six, eight. Oh, that's fast. That is fast. That felt fast. Okay, that was fast. We used 48 seconds. We had no penalties, none. So a total time of 48 seconds and it's still walking pace. I'm gutted. I really thought that would at least be slow jog. But no, still performing at walking pace. But that's a massive improvement a minute off the time I was doing four days ago. So it does feel like this quick training is doing something. Let's see how I get on for my last day. That's tomorrow. So day five tomorrow, today, 48 seconds. And now it's time for the final day. Well, that's not going to be a love walking pace. Oh dear. Quite slow. Well, I've used 1 minute 6 seconds. I actually got two wrong. So a 10 second penalty which is 1 minute 16. So it's not as fast as the previous day, but it is still a lot faster than when I started. So I'm definitely getting better. Maybe my lack of coffee this morning has affected that score. I'm still at walking pace. But look, this wasn't what we were trying to test. We weren't trying to see how quick I would get at doing sums. We were trying to see if this daily brain training would make me any smarter. So now let's jump over to chess and see how we get on. If you remember, last time with chess, we played this AI, Jimmy, who adapts to my play and makes it quite easy for me to win. So we're going to play Jimmy again, but we're going to be measuring my accuracy, how many blunders I have, how many misses I have, and then also how many great moves I make as well. So let's get started with chess, see how we do. Well, I won and you know what? I did much better. I got a 86.4 accuracy, 15 best moves, only one miss, no blunders, didn't get any brilliant moves, didn't get any great moves, didn't also make any mistakes. But that is a significant improvement on last week, which is fantastic. But does it actually say that brain training made me smarter? Well, I'm not so sure. I was significantly better at chess. My accuracy score was 15 points higher. I made five more best moves and had three fewer mistakes. I was genuinely shocked. I did not expect any change. And for a brief moment, despite all the evidence, I actually believed that brain training might have helped. I thought this was evidence. My brain was faster at calculating quicksums and I was noticeably better at chess. It felt believable. But of course it's not accurate. Dans shared hard evidence that shows that brain training won't improve my chess. It's far more likely that my game improved by chance or by placebo, or perhaps because I'd just played chess a week earlier to start the experiment. Yet despite knowing all of that, I for a brief moment believed that the brain training had helped. I think this is due to some smart advertising on Nintendo's part. Their years of claiming that brain training does improve our cognitive ability made me sincerely believe it did. But I don't think this is the only reason. In fact, Dan says the reason I believed and why so many others believed Nintendo's claims might be due to something called the Mozart Effect.
- [30:50]
Professor Dan Simons
Yeah, so the Mozart effect was the idea that listening to Mozart could do things like increase your iq. And there was a paper published in Nature making this claim that it led to an IQ increase, especially for like mental rotation, spatial paper folding, sorts of tasks led to this increase in your basic cognitive abilities. In some ways, this was sort of one of the first brain training claims. The idea that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart could change something that's as stable as IQ tends to be. Whatever you think IQ measures, it tends to be a fairly reliable measure from time to time for a person. It's a stable individual difference predictor. So the idea that you could shift IQ by seven points or something like that by listening to Mozart for 10 minutes, when long term interventions for nutrition and health care in schools don't necessarily have effects quite that big is an example of a really potent effect. Right. It's a tiny intervention leading to a giant consequence. Turns out it doesn't hold up that if you. Chris Chabri, my co author on our books, did a meta analysis of all of the studies back this is way back, but he did a meta analysis of the studies of the Mozart effect and basically showed that there was no there there. There was no evidence that listening to Mozart really did much of anything. But it became an industry at the time, so much so that the governor of Georgia gave a cassette tape that's telling you when this was done, cassette taped to parents of all newborn infants in the state at government expense because Mozart was going to help them thrive. There was never any evidence that this would work. The only studies were done with college students and then there were a couple of studies done with rats, which is kind of funny since rats actually couldn't hear what people claimed was doing the work for the Mozart effect.
- [32:43]
Phil Agnew
The Mozart effect is claimed to boost IQ by seven points. It led to dramatic changes in public policy, launched dozens of successful companies, and received a lot of government money. Yet it's entirely false, Dan writes in Invisible Gorilla how the British researcher Susan Hallam arranged for the BBC to conduct a massive experiment 8,000 children in 200 schools across the United Kingdom. The children listened to either a Mozart string quintet, a discussion about scientific experiments, or three popular songs, including Country House by Blur. After listening, all the children would then perform cognitive tests like those used in the original Mozart effect study. The children who listened to popular music actually ended up doing better than those who listened to the Mozart music. There was no difference in performance between those who listened to the Mozart music and the those who heard the scientific discussion. This showed pretty conclusively that listening to some music can give a minimal boost to cognitive performance. Not an improvement in IQ by 7 points, but a small improvement. However, Mozart's music in this example didn't work at all. The article on this finding cheekily dubbed it the Blur effect. And yet, like Nintendo brain training, the vast majority of people immediately believed the Mozart Effects claims it felt genuine. It built on our existing understanding of how the world works, so it was widely accepted. We strongly associate classical music with intelligence. Smart people listen to classical music and smart people write it. Classical music is loved by the upper class and ignored by the working class. These pre existing biases made the Mozart effect an easy idea to believe. Mozart's music is for smart people, so listening to it, well surely that would make us smarter. We believe it, although it's completely false. I think the same is true for brain training. We strongly associate cognitive puzzles with intelligence. Smart people are good at completing math puzzles quickly and smart people exercise their brains regularly. Sudoku requires concentration and effort and we believe that doing Sudokus must help train our brain, just like lifting weights will increase our muscle. These pre existing beliefs made the brain training claims so potent. Like the Mozart Effect, the claims seemed self self evident. It's built on our belief, so we believed it wholeheartedly even though it's not true. Combine that with some incredibly persuasive advertisements and a seemingly independent Japanese neuroscientist to back up the claims and Nintendo brain training took off. Yet the brain training won't improve our memory. It won't keep our minds smarter. It won't actually make me a better chess player. But the vast, vast majority of us still incorrectly believe believe these games do work. The ads were too effective and Nintendo still makes brain training games today. For me, this saga highlights the power of advertising and marketing to shift public opinion dramatically. The science is clear brain training won't work, and yet millions of us believe the opposite. These ads are too persuasive. The claims are built on our pre existing belief, just like with the Mozart effect. And as of December 2021, the very latest version of the brain training game has already sold 1.2 million copies. A series of good ads can change public opinion for decades, even if the advertisement's claims are entirely made up. That is all for this episode of Nudge. Firstly, thank you to Dan Simons for coming on and sharing his views on brain training. His two books, Nobody's Foolish, An Invisible Gorilla, inspired this episode, and many of the studies I cite in this show came straight from those books. If you'd like to understand how our minds are influenced by ads, scam artists and cognitive biases, then these two books are must reads. I've left links to both of them in the show notes. Secondly, a very big thank you to voxpopme for running the video survey for today's episode. With voxpopme you can easily run qualitative research by using video surveys and live interviews. You can invite participants from their enormous panel and for video surveys, see results within a few hours. It is a fantastic tool, not just because it's fast and informative, but also because its analysis tools are excellent. I was able to use the voxpop Me AI to categorize the hours of responses I had into themes, helping me quickly understand what Brits really thought about brain training. If you want to try out voxpopme, head to the link in the show notes. There is a handy demo on there to explain how it works. This episode was a fairly mammoth one for me. It took me months to put together, so if you did like it, please consider sharing it with a friend. Perhaps leave me a review wherever you listen to the podcast. Or perhaps at the very least, please stop telling your kids that brain training games will improve their memory. Alright, that is all for today. I'm your host Phil Agnew. This has been nudge, the UK. UK's number one marketing podcast. The UK's number one marketing podcast and I'll be back next week for another episode of Nudge. Bye.