About 2.3 million US adults over age 65—more than 4%—have a diagnosis of dementia. But even without a diagnosis, some amount of cognitive decline is normal as age sets in.

Whether it’s due to fear of cognitive decline or we notice cognitive impairments when we’re stressed, many of us have had moments when we thought we could use an extra cognitive boost.

The good news is that research has shown that people can make changes throughout adulthood, which they can help prevent or delay cognitive decline and even reduce their risk of dementia. These include quitting smoking and proper blood pressure management.

In addition to these lifestyle changes, many people are turning to brain training games that claim to optimize your brain’s efficiency and capacity at any age. Makers of brain-training apps and games claim their products can do everything from prevent cognitive decline to improving your IQ.

But so far, these the claims have been met with mixed evidence.

WE cognitive neurologists WHO focus on brain health throughout adult life. We study how the brain informs cognition and the ways we can use brain imaging to understand cognitive and brain training interventions. We aim to understand how the brain naturally changes over time, and what we can do about it.

Ongoing research is showing what actually happens to the brain when it’s engaged in new learning, providing a window into how people can maintain brain health and how brain training games can play a role. We think these studies offer some strategies for training your brain the right way.

The truth about brain training

Brain training is a set of tasks, often computerized, based on well-known tests to measure a type of cognition, but in a gamified manner.

Most brain training games have been designed to help participants master one or more specific skills. An example is a game that shows you a combination of letters and numbers, where sometimes you have to quickly identify whether the letter is even or odd, while other times you have to switch to deciding whether the letter is a consonant or a vowel. The game can increase in difficulty, requiring you to complete the task within a set time limit.

Such games are designed to require a high level of attention, fast processing speed and a flexible mind to alternate the rules, which is known as executive functioning.

However, it turns out that the specific skills learned in these games often don’t translate to more general, real-world applications. Whether brain games achieve their ultimate goal of lasting cognitive improvement in a number of domains is yet to be seen much debated among psychologists. Making such claims requires rigorous evidence that playing a particular game improves cognitive or brain performance.

In 2016, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission issued a $50 million penalty to one of the most popular brain training games at the time, Lumosity, to mislead consumers into believing they could achieve higher levels of mental performance at work or school and prevent or delay cognitive decline by using its product.

If improving a brain game only helps the player improve at games or very similar games, maybe game developers need a different approach.

Challenge yourself

In a study called Project Synapsein which one of us, Ian McDonough, helped evaluate the final results, a group of participants were tasked with engaging in a new activity with which they had little experience. They were assigned to either digital photography or quilting. Although these activities were not games, they were intended to be engaging and challenging and take place in a social environment.

Another group was assigned activities that involved little active learning, such as engaging in themed activities related to travel or cooking, or more solitary activities such as solving crossword puzzles, listening to music, or watching classic movies. These groups met for 15 hours per week for 14 weeks. All participants were tested at the beginning and end of the study on various cognitive skills.

Those assigned to the new challenging activities showed significant gains in memory, processing speed, and reasoning skills over those assigned to the less challenging activities. None of the participants were directly trained on these cognitive tests, meaning that the challenging activities improved skills that transferred to new situations, such as remembering a list of words or solving abstract problems.

Brain scans of the participants showed that over the course of the study, those involved in the more challenging activities increased their neural efficiency. In other words, their brains didn’t have to work as hard to solve problems or remember information.

The study also showed that the more time participants spent on their projects, the the bigger their brain gained and the better their memory was at the end of the 14 weeks.

One difference between the types of activities involved in Project Synapse and traditional brain training is whether the activities are done in a group or alone. Although other studies found a benefit for social interaction, the Synapse Project found no difference between social and solitary activities in the low-challenge group. So the challenge, rather than the social components, seems to be the driver of maintaining cognitive and brain health.

Keep your brain healthy

You might think it’s time to take up digital photography or quilting. But ultimately, it’s not about those specific tasks. What matters most is that you challenge yourself, which often comes naturally when you’re doing something new.

New learning that is often accompanied by a sense of effort—and sometimes frustration—requires accessing resources from the frontal lobewhich manages thinking and judgment and the parietal lobewhich processes attention and combines different sensory inputs. These regions are constantly talking to each other to keep the mind adaptable in all kinds of situations and to prevent the brain from going into “regular mode.”

Where does that leave us? On the one hand, games presented as “training your brain” may not be the best solution compared to other ways to improve cognition.

Ironically, you may already be training your brain by playing strenuous games that aren’t marketed as “brain training.” For example, games like Tetris or real time strategy games like Rise of Nations showed improvements in player awareness. Research has even shown that playing Super Mario 64 can lead to brain volume increases in regions such as hippocampusthe memory center of the brain.

While little evidence suggests that any game or brain training program improves cognition overall, some may improve specific aspects of it. As with other activities, challenge is key.

If you’re a word person, try a numbers game. If you like math, consider a word game or puzzle. Choosing a task that makes you uncomfortable gives you the best chance of maintaining and even improving your cognition. Once you start to feel a sense of ease and familiarity, that’s a sign that it’s time to switch tasks, change the game, or at least add a challenge by advancing to a new level of difficulty that feels just beyond your reach.

This article was originally published on conversation of Ian McDonough and Michael Dulas at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Read on original article here.