Strategic Thinking Has Wide-Ranging Mental Health Benefits, Research Shows

Rebecca Lewis April 30, 2014

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Strategy-based cognitive training may help enhance cognitive performance and spill over to real-life benefits – researchers found. The research-based perspective highlights cognitive, neural and real-life changes measured in randomized clinical trials that compared a gist-reasoning strategy-training program to memory training in populations ranging from teenagers to healthy older adults, individuals with brain injury to those at-risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

A team of researchers from the Centre for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas looked at how strategic thinking (defined as a mental or thinking process applied by an individual in the context of achieving success in a game or other endeavour) boosts brain function and eliminates toxic habits that impair efficient brain performance.

At a basic level, research participants were encouraged to filter competing information that is irrelevant and focus only on important information. At more advanced levels, participants were instructed to generate interpretations, themes or generalized statements from information they were wanting or needing to read, for example. Each strategy built on previous strategies and research participants were challenged to integrate all steps when tackling mental activities both inside and outside of training.

Cognitive gains were measured based on the following areas: abstracting, reasoning, and innovating. What’s more surprising is that the benefits spilled over other untrained areas, such as memory for facts, planning, and problem solving. “What’s exciting about this work is that in randomized trials comparing gist reasoning training to memory training, we found that it was not learning new information that engaged widespread brain networks and elevated cognitive performance, but rather actually deeper processing of information and using that information in new ways that augmented brain performance.” said Dr Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Centre for BrainHeath and Dee Wyly Distinguished University Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas.

“Strengthening intellectual capacity is no longer science fiction; what used to seem improbable is now in the realm of reality."

According to Dr Chapman, their study was different from previous researches because it did not focus on specific cognitive functions such as speed of processing, memory, or learning isolated new skills. “Instead, the gist reasoning training program encouraged use of a common set of multi-dimensional thinking strategies to synthesize information and elimination of toxic habits that impair efficient brain performance.”

The data-driven perspective article was published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

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BrainHealth Research Shows Strategic Thinking Strengthens Intellectual Capacity