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Just as all those Baby Einstein DVDs backfired, we’re just beginning to learn that arcade video games seem to produce reliable and persistent cognitive benefits:

The brain, as always, is a category buster. It excels at shredding our neat preconceptions and abstract classifications. We like to speculate about technology in general, about the neural effects of television and computers and tablets, but these tools are only incidental

The New York Times and its Learning Network recently put out a call asking teachers to make videos describing how technology had changed their classrooms. You can watch our pick of the best submissions here.

Confidence-Based Repetition These combined concepts of Repetition, Active Recall, and Metacognition work together to create Brainscape’s unique process of Confidence-Based Repetition (CBR). CBR acts essentially as your personalized knowledge stream, where bite-sized concepts are repeated one after another, in Question/Answer pairs, and then re-entered into the repetition queue in intervals based on your confidence in how well you know them. Low-confidence items (e.g. the 1’s and 2’s) are repeated more often until you upgrade your confidence to higher levels.

Generalizability to non-game situations is the big question surrounding other emerging games, particularly software that is being marketed explicitly as a way to keep neurons spry as we age. The jury is still out on whether practicing with these games helps people outside of the context of the game.