Children, youth, go and ADHD

[sybob]

As I think this has not been posted here before, and deserves more attention, I hereby recommend this article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4023088/

This scientific article shows that children with ADHD benefit from playing go. The double blind study showed significant brain changes and improvements.

[fireproof]

Thanks for sharing the article -- very interesting. I'm surprised the results were as strong as they seem to suggest.

The current study had several limitations. First, the number of subjects was not large enough to generalize the effects of playing Go on children with ADHD. Future studies of a larger number of children will need to be done to conclusively investigate the effects of playing Go. Second, the EEG assessment was focused only on the prefrontal cortex.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the therapeutic effects of playing Go on enhancing cognitive functions in children with ADHD. We suggest that playing Go may be an alternative and complementary therapeutic method and that a modified intervention program for inattention and executive deficit based on the theory of playing Go could be developed.

I hope this means they'll do more studies!

[Boidhre]

My son has ADHD. One thing I've read numerous times is psychologists and psychiatrists encouraging "simple" games as part of the therapy (simple basically meaning the kid won't get overstimulated by the game and have trouble focusing on it because there are too many bells and whistles). The studies I remember reading were focused on more common games in the West like Chinese Chequers and Draughts. Go would share similar characteristics to these games in terms of lacking bells, whistles and esoteric rules.

The idea seems to be that children who can learn to focus by using these kind of low stimulation games can reap returns on this in higher stimulation situations later. My experience as a parent is this kind of outcome isn't unreasonable. I've seen progress in one area help an unrelated area a few times now. It's not a fix on its own but it could be a useful part of the non-medication toolbox for parents.

[jeromie]

That was really interesting, thanks. I think it's important to note that they were playing over the board games, not on the computer. As someone who deals with my own attention issues at times, I can anecdotally say that makes a big difference.