According to a news release from the University of California-San Francisco, a racing video game improves brain power and reverses some of the harmful impacts of aging on the brain.

The researchers note that the findings offer some scientific support to the growing field of brain fitness, which has been blasted for missing evidence that such training can lead to long-lasting and significant alterations in the brain.

In the game, older adults race a car around a track while a number of different road signs appear. Participants are told to watch out for a specific type of sign, while purposefully disregarding all the rest, and to tap a button whenever that particular sign pops up. Multitasking creates interference in the brain that weakens performance. The researchers discovered that this impedance increases significantly as people age.

However, after receiving only 12 hours of video game training, spread over the course of one month, the participants bettered their performance until it eclipsed that of 20-somethings who tried the game for the very first time.

The video game training also bettered the participants’ efficiency in two other crucial cognitive areas: working memory and sustained attention. According to the researchers, the participants kept their skills at the racing video games six months after the training had been completed.

“The finding is a powerful example of how plastic the older brain is,” said Dr. Adam Gazzaley, UCSF associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center.

The racing video game, called NeuroRacer, does more than any run-of-the-mill game to condition the brain. NeuroRacer enfeebles people’s natural inclination to work on autopilot after they’ve become proficient at a skill.

“Normally, when you get better at something, it gets easier,” Gazzaley said. But with NeuroRacer, “when you get better, it gets harder.”

Encouraged by evidence that the adult brain is capable of learning, the researchers discovered evidence of a possible brain mechanism that may give a reason for the advancements they observed in older participants, and why these improvements were passed to other cognitive areas. EEG recordings point to alterations in a neural network linked to cognitive control, which is necessary to chase goals.

The researchers evaluated midline frontal theta in the prefrontal cortex, as well as the agreement in these waves between frontal and posterior regions of the brain. As the older participants became better at NeuroRacer, their brains adjusted this key neural network and its activity started to look like that of young adults.

“We see this as evidence that the training may have improved our study participants’ ability to stay in an engaged, active state for a longer period of time,” said first author Joaquin A. Anguera, a post-doc in Gazzaley’s lab.

The researchers discovered that the training-induced alterations in this neural network foretold how well participants would do on a Test of Variables of Attention, which determines sustained attention.

“The amount that midline frontal theta went up was related to something that was untrained, this other measure, the TOVA,” Anguera noted. “It implies there’s something that changed that was common to the training and to the task we tested afterwards.”

According to the researchers, these results reveal a common neural basis of cognitive control that is improved by the challenging and high-interference conditions of the video game, which might justify how playing a racing video game could better something as seemingly unconnected as memory.

Though additional research is needed, the results could have wide application in the medical field, as other brain disorders are also linked with deficits in cognitive control.

“Follow up studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and transcranial electrical stimulation are still needed to better understand exactly how this network is involved in the performance changes,” Gazzaley added.

The results are discussed in greater detail in the journal Nature.