Originally published at: Elderly brain hack: How a Cold War spy test boosts fitness and sharpness - Boing Boing
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Time for a new batch of mental training apps that are actually based on science!
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*During the Cold War, U.S, intelligence agencies used the Stroop task to identify potential Russian spies by presenting them with a color-word test in Russian, where a native Russian speaker would slow down when encountering incongruent color-word combinations, revealing their ability to read Russian and potentially their true identity as a spy; whereas a non-Russian speaker would not experience the same delay because the words would be meaningless to them.
Why not just make them recite the following and see if they flinch?
"I am not a Russian spy
Cross my heart and hope to die"
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I don’t see a link to the study. That is unusual. Or maybe it is me and my declining cognition!
I am going to pass this along to my Cardiac Rehab class. We do balance, falling and recovery exercises as well as the usual cardio, strength and stretching. But if this would be good to add to the aging arsenal. That should read “keeping healthy while ageing arsenal”.
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Yeah. Not linking the news report or the study is….unfortunate. Credit due and all that.
Here’s the study for you:
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kinda sounds like nothingburger wthout a link to the study and the vague description, lacking any essential information about the numbers of people tested, the size of the controlgroup and the allegedly benefits in percentage, spiced with the always questionable phrasing of
“These findings show that BET can improve cognitive and physical performance in older adults.”
which means may or may not be beneficial. thats my take on it.
website tells me my browser is “out of date” and shows nothing. oh well. e/ ah, elsevier. oh well.
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Update your browser? I don’t know.
while every other website works, or at least to a usable degree, and this one doesnt, even with scripts on, and then tells me to update my browser to work at all, I sure af dont. 
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From the conclusions:
Cognitive and physical and performance was generally superior when fresh and fatigued at mid-test and post-test for both BET and exercise training groups compared to the control group. The BET group outperformed the exercise group when fatigued at mid-test and post-test both cognitively (always) and physically (sometimes). The pre-to-post changes in cognitive performance when fresh and fatigued averaged 3.7 % and 7.8 % for BET, 3.6 % and 4.5 % for exercise, and −0.4 % and 0.3 % for control groups. The corresponding changes in physical performance averaged 16.5 % and 29.9 % for BET, 13.8 % and 22.4 % for exercise, and 10.8 % and 7.1 % for control groups.
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And here’s the bit on participants.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
Twenty-four healthy older women (range 65–78, M = 71.42, SD = 4.02 years) were recruited from the community (a small town in rural Spain) and gave informed consent to participate. They reported that they did not perform any regular physical activity. The inclusion criteria were age (over 65 years) and sex (women only). The exclusion criteria were engagement in physical or cognitive training in the last three years and presence of mental or physical medical conditions that interfered with performing the cognitive and exercise tasks. We encouraged participants to maintain their diet but avoid alcohol ingestion. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee at the University of Extremadura in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Power calculations focused on the group by test interaction effects associated with our 3 group by 4 test experimental design and analysis. Specifically, GPower (Faul et al., 2007) indicated that with a sample size of 24, our study was powered at 80 % to detect significant (p < .05) between-within (i.e., group by test) interaction effects (f = .28, ηp2 = .07) corresponding to a small-to-medium effect size by analysis of variance (Cohen, 1992). Previous studies have documented the performance benefits of BET compared to standard physical training with similar sample sizes: 20 (Barzegarpoor et al., 2021), 22 (Staiano et al., 2022), 24 (Dallaway et al., 2023), and 24–26 (Staiano et al., 2023), and young adult athletes. Accordingly, the current sample size was deemed adequate to explore the effects of BET on performance.
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Yeah - I share your frustration.
Sage advice for those who are not on an OS that cannot be upgraded due to age of perfectly serviceable hardware. Some of us are, however. Websites that do not accommodate back-level browser versions (and why not? It’s just an effing website FFS!) tend not to get my business/eyeballs.
During the Cold War, U.S, intelligence agencies used the Stroop task to identify potential Russian spies by presenting them with a color-word test in Russian, where a native Russian speaker would slow down when encountering incongruent color-word combinations, revealing their ability to read Russian and potentially their true identity as a spy; whereas a non-Russian speaker would not experience the same delay because the words would be meaningless to them.
Sneaky buggers, those spy types, eh?
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