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Piaget and Brain Fitness

Jean Piaget was a researcher who lived early in the 20th century and had a big impact on developmental psychology. He studied his own children and developed a theory of how mental abilities develop that has been extremely influential.

One of Piaget’s key ideas is that we organize information in mental structures called schemas. You might have a scheme for how a car works. You know about how gasoline is used and how the air intake and electrical systems work. Then maybe one day you learn about a problem with how the air filter works on your car. It would be new information, but you would easily be able to incorporate it into your overall schema of how a car works. When it’s easy to put information into an existing schema, Piaget called the process assimilation.

But something else could happen. What if in the next few years we all have electric cars? All your information about air filters and gas pumps would no longer be relevant. You would have to develop a new schema, or modify the existing car schema to have a new major category for electrical cars. When the new information means that you have modify an existing schema, Piaget called the process accommodation.

What does this have to do with brain fitness? If you look at the kind of activities that seem to be the best for increasing brain fitness, it looks as though they are activities that require accommodation rather than assimilation. It may be helpful to spend your time learning new vocabulary words (assimilating new information to the language you already know), but it may be better to spend time learning a new language (accommodating your existing schemas to include new ways of expressing meaning).

So my suggestion is that what’s best for brain training will be activities that are really new to you and make you change your habitual ways of thinking about or seeing world.