Train away, get smart

Companies with more than 200 staff can now deploy the latest in brain science to give their staff a competitive edge. And they had better get cracking. A trial of executives has shown that their decision-making functions are poor.

A company called Brain Department has licensed its computer-based cognitive brain exercises, which are shown to improve five areas of the mind: executive decision-making, attention, memory, language and visual abilities.

“We have licensed the exercises and developed a delivery and reporting systems for large organisations,” Brain Department co-founder Wendy Hand says. “When staff are stressed, the first thing that is affected is decision-making and it is a downward spiral from there.”

A quantitative meta-analysis of seven studies carried out by Michael Valenzuela at the University of NSW shows that the benefits of cognitive brain training persist for individuals who take the exercises for a few months.

Results are benchmarked against global comparisons for age, gender and educational level from exercises completed by 50 million users, Hand says. The exercises have been in use for decades in research settings.

A study involving executives conducted by Valenzuela will be released later this year. Hand says the results for executives were poor. “Executives love to do the executive function exercises because they think they will be good at them. They are not. Most cannot think more than one move ahead and strategic thinking requires to think at least two or three moves ahead.”

Hand says “brain exercise products” are meant for individuals but her company has developed products that provide organisation-wide data, without identifying individuals, and can be delivered three times a day by email. The company started selling the product, called Spark, this year. It has made one sale so far, to a 70-strong division of St George Bank.

BRW

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