By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph | January 21, 2018

A new brain training game works like ‘digital Ritalin’ to improve focus, researchers have shown and are hopeful it could replace controversial ‘chemical cosh’ drugs.

The University of Cambridge has today launched a free app which they claim provides a ‘welcome antidote to daily distractions’ helping to calm and focus the mind so that people can perform tasks with greater focus.

The game, called Decoder, invites users to tap the screen when a number combination appears helping to promote ‘flow,’ the state of complete concentration which allows people to operate at the top of their ability.

Trials on 75 people showed that performance after playing the came was comparable to taking Ritalin, a common treatment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

“We’ve all experienced coming home from work feeling that we’ve been busy all day, but unsure what we actually did,” says Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry, at Cambridge University.

“Most of us spend our time answering emails, looking at text messages, searching social media, trying to multitask.

“But instead of getting a lot done, we sometimes struggle to complete even a single task and fail to achieve our goal for the day. Then we go home, and even there we find it difficult to ‘switch off’ and read a book or watch TV without picking up our smartphones.

The team developed the app after becoming concerned that  young people were having more difficulty sustaining attention and concentration because of a constant slew of emails, texts, notifications and updates.

In the new study published today in the journal Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience the researchers demonstrated that playing Decoder on an iPad for eight one-hours over one month improves attention and concentration, activating an important network in the brain. The improved focus remained when players shifted their attention to a different kind of test.

The team is hopeful it could be used for people who have conditions which make concentration difficult such as ADHD or traumatic brain injury.

Between two and five per centre of schoolchildren have ADHD and the use of drugs to control the problem has doubled in the past ten years with NHS prescriptions rising from 761,763 items in 2007 to 1,654,694 in 2017.

“In addition to healthy people, we hope that the game will be beneficial for patients who have impairments in attention, including those with ADHD or traumatic brain injury,” added Prof Sahakian

“We plan to start a study with traumatic brain injury patients this year.

The game is being distributed by app developer Peak, who specialise in evidence-based ‘brain training’ apps and it was released in the App Store for free this morning within the app ‘Peak – Brain Training.

Dr George Savulich added: “Many brain training apps on the market are not supported by rigorous scientific evidence.

“It is engaging and fun to play. The level of difficulty is matched to the individual player and participants enjoy the challenge of the cognitive training.”