1.1: Snake oil: An old technology
- Page ID
- 129485
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We found some “cognitive” technologies did not live to their hype. For example, speed-reading techniques do little more than train people how to skim text quickly. Too bad any gains in speed are accompanied with losses in comprehension (Rayner et al. 2016). There appears to be no strong evidence that brain training games do anything beyond training people on the games themselves (Simons et al. 2016). No far transfer here. Similarly, the evidence for cognition enhancing drugs (that do anything beyond enhancing alertness) is just as dissapointing (Battleday and Brem 2015; Marraccini et al. 2016; Mehlman 2004).