Clemster's Playground

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

My Brain Is How Old?

So... I was bad last week and I looking at cell phones and such, somehow a copy of Brain Age just happened to end up in my hands as I passed through the checkout counter. I have NO idea how this happened... .

Brain Age is a "game" that is supposed to help you exercise your brain. By performing the daily exercises is should help your brain stay in shape. Some of the exercises include performing a sequence of simple math calculations as quickly as possible, counting the syllables in a sentence, and memorizing a list of numbers and remembering their positions on the screen from low to high. Each exercise is short taking maybe 5 minutes at a time. Since you have to rely heavily on writing with the stylus it allows you to switch from right-handed to left-handed mode which I VERY much approve being being a south paw. So far I'm enjoying doing the exercises for about a half-hour each day. Your results are graphed allowing you to track your progress.

The first test you take after setting up a user profile is a check of your brain age. This test involved reading the colors of text of the words. So the word may be "blue", but if the color of the letters are red then "red" is what you have to say. For some reason it didn't like the way I said blue and I kept those ones wrong. So after that first test it measured my Brain Age at 70 where 20 is the ideal age. So the game was saying my brain was as "slow" as a 70 year old's! I was pretty shocked, but then had to laugh at my reaction. Over the last few days I've checked my Brain Age which now uses three tests to get a better reading. I'm down to 32 as of last night.

If anything this game is going to help me with my math skills which are obviously rusty. The hardest part is not having a brain fart because you just got an answer wrong. It's so tempting to try and go back to fix your mistake but you can't. The timer keeps going while you try and refocus. Luckily they don't play a ticking noise or show you the click. That would make matters worse.

Oh and Brain Age also comes with Sudoku which is fun when you can write the numbers in with your stylus. Apparently specific Sudoku game for the DS doesn't have the same interface. You have to point at the number you want in the square. Guess they didn't want to try and figure out everyone's hand writing - the lazy bums.

For $25 CAD I think Brain Age would be worth it just for the Sudoku, but the training exercises are a lot of fun considering that it's work. Honestly I don't think you can call yourself a true Nintendo DS owner unless you own this game. ;)

Matthew.

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