Tuesday 31 July 2007

Pic of the day: Brain age: 80 years! We are not amused. Or are we?

Brain Training (Brain Age)

Sometimes the Japanese do come up with original ideas. When I was a kid, this was believed to be very rare. There was no reason to worry about their competitive advantage, it was said, because all they could do was make cheap copies of Western inventions. Well, we still don't worry about their competitive advantage. Actually, quite the opposite. Their economic problems in the 1990es turned out to be worse for us than their success had been. It's been a long time since World War 2, and by now the Japanese are our allies and quite well integrated into the global culture. They are also more inventive than we used to give them credit for. Today's entry is a result of that.

Dr. Ryuta Kawashima is a Japanese brain expert (with training from a Swedish university, ironically) who has taken his science to the people. First in the form of a book, but lately in cooperation with Nintendo in the form of a computer game to train certain essential functions of the brain. The game is known in the USA as Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! but here in Europe as Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain?.

The result is a strange blend of game and brain training. This has been attempted with mixed results for children, usually called "edutainment". This game might interest some children,but it is squarely aimed at adults, and especially the elderly. Dr Kawashima, himself born in 1959, seems to believe that the ideal brain age is 20 years old, and that the brain later in life deteriorates from lack of use. (Recent science has a more nuanced picture: It is now commonly believed that the maturation of the prefrontal cortex continues in most people through much of their 20es, and that the ability of the brain to share tasks among different parts may improve for even longer. There is also a growing consensus that the brain as a whole does not become much less capable until Alzheimer's sets in. The lower test scores for healthy elderly people are instead signs of the Flynn Effect: People of their generation simply grew up less intelligent than children now, as shown by archives of IQ tests.)

Even so, there is little doubt that skills used are retained better than those left on the shelf. The skills trained in Brain Training are supposedly located in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is most uniquely human. They center on the ability to make correct evaluations, but in practice most of the exercises also make heavy use of short-term memory. I am not sure whether this is located in the same part of the brain, but it is a resource you will appreciate once you start losing it. This is the memory that lets you keep a phone number in your head until you get the person you want to speak to, or remember a meaningless word long enough to Google it without having to go back and check the spelling again. It should also help me not leave my key in the door when I go to work, I hope...

***

The game runs on the Nintendo DS and nothing else. If you don't have a DS, I recommend the newer DS Lite. As the name implies, it is a very lightweight gadget, and stylish as well. In the USA you can (at the time of writing) get it bundled with the second game in the series, though I am quite happy with the first so far. I may buy the next game when this one runs out, which takes exactly one year. (You can however start over with a new identity too.)

One intriguing aspect of this game is that it requires you to hold your game console sideways, like a book. The touch-screen is used for written answers; you don't use the buttons at all during normal use. There is also an option for left-handed writing, in which case all the text is turned upside down so you can just flip your "book" over, and the handwriting recognition is adjusted accordingly. Both the voice and handwriting recognition are quite excellent, but of course not up to human standards. Especially the first days, you will lose years of brain age from irritating errors. If you are a foreigner to the English language, as I am, you are probably going to stop using the speech feature at all for graded tests. The handwriting is very accurate though once you get used to it.

While you navigate the menus, a 3D cartoon of Dr Kawashima's head shows on the non-touch screen, keeping you company with small comments or ad-hoc exercises that are not graded, like "draw these 3 things" (only once a day) or "what did you eat for breakfast". Some of his game tips will get repetitive after a while, but then again you will probably start tuning those out.

There is a quick play mode, which you may want to use the first time to get an introduction to how it works. Later, you can use this to show to your coworkers who may resent you playing games during work hours. It is likely to change their mind if you get far enough to actually make them try it. This is not your grandkids' type of game. It is indeed what it says, brain training. But surprisingly fun brain training.

To use it regularly, you have to create an identity. This is done in seconds. Of course it requires your actual age in addition to your name, so Dr Kawashima can make responses appropriate for your age. Actually I am not sure if that is even possible for young players. Then again there are probably not many of those. As I said, this is marketed straight at the middle-aged and above. (Though severely underage kids may sneak off with it, especially if you indicate in any way that it is not meant for them.)

Each day you can test your "brain age" again. Expect horrible results the first couple times, then rapid improvement (I know this because even though I bought it yesterday, I write this three weeks later) and eventually a plateau where you will either give up or improve slowly and fitfully. The first times will get you used to the interface and what to expect, so perhaps you really should do a couple of the "quick play" first. Otherwise you may end up with a brain age of 80, as I did the first time! This was largely from me barking "Red! Red! Red!" during the Stroop test, as my "r" is very different from the English "r". I am sure the real Dr Kawashima would have sympathized. (Japanese often mistake the letters "r" and "l" in English.)

The Stroop test will be included if you choose spoken answers. Since the game is common on the commute, there is a writing-only option which does not include this test. But you should definitely take it sometime when you are not graded, it is a great brain exercise. The name of four common colors (red, blue, black and yellow) are written in one of those colors, but not necessarily the same. So you may see "yellow" in black color, and then you have to answer "black" as fast as possible. After a lifetime of reading, it is surprisingly hard to see a word as just colored letters when you only have milliseconds to decide. Then again, in traffic you sometimes only have milliseconds to decide too, so keep that millisecond brain polished! It trains the ability to make decisions that run contrary to habit. You know you'll need that someday.

The written tests are more ordinary. A simple arithmetic test where you answer 20 questions like "2+2=" and "7x8=". A word memory test where you stuff your short term memory with 30 words, each four letters long. No, not that kind of four-letter words! They are not topically related unless you have a vivid imagination. Which you better have, or keeping 30 entities in short term memory is inhumanly difficult. The untrained human is said to be able to remember 7 things at the same time. That won't take you far here, but if you can make an ad-hoc story involving a bunch of the words, this will be stored in your brain as one unit. Or you could just do it over and over until your brain expands, I guess. Another classic that almost always turns up is the "connect maze" where the first 13 letters and numbers are randomly thrown onto a page and you have to connect them in one continuous line running from A---1---B--2 etc. Don't panic or valuable seconds just run past you! Finally there is the misnamed "number cruncher" which is a bit like the Stroop test only written. Numbers are thrown onto the screen. How many black numbers? When you answer, the screen shifts to another. How many yellow? How many 8s? How many rotating? How many pulsing? How many sliding? I hate the sliders, they are so hard to count! Still, you get used to it.

Just when you've finished your test and your abominable brain age is declared, there is no rest for the wicked. Dr Kawashima orders you to train your brain (which you should definitely see the need for by now). You start with something simple (like calculations x 20 again) and get a stamp on today's date. Well done! Of course there are several other exercises if you volunteer. The more of them you do, the hotter your brain! Calculations x 100. Syllable count. Reading aloud. Head count. And my absolute favorite, the fiendishly difficult "Low to High". 4 boxes appear on the screen, and then for a moment 4 numbers appear instead. Now tick the boxes in sequence from the lowest number to the highest. You did? 5 boxes appear, and the process repeats until you fail. Then it backs up one and tries again, keeping you always on your toes. One day I will catch them all!

Or perhaps my brain actually will be 80 before then, because I will be 80 myself. But for the next three weeks at least I am going to come back every day. "Aren't you a trooper" as Dr Kawashima will say.

***

The non-Japanese versions also include Sudoku, a number puzzle that has become very popular in a short time. The name is Japanese, for this is where the puzzle became popular. It is not a Japanese invention, though. In the western world, it languished in the shadow of crosswords. But Japanese is poorly suited to crosswords, because it is written in a mixture of different syllable scripts and pictograms, so that some signs symbolize sounds while others symbolize concepts. (Japanese is its own IQ test if you ask me. Students keep learning new kanji, word signs, well into college.) In contrast, Sudoku only uses the numbers for 1 to 9.

Standard Sudoku is written on a 9x9 grid which also consists of 3 boxes side by side and stacked atop each other. When completed, each number will be written once and only once in each vertical line, each horizontal line, and each 3x3 box. Do you think that is impossible? That was my first reaction. But there are actually a huge number of possible solutions to this. And so you are given a grid with some numbers already filled in, and the final solution must include those numbers in those positions. How many numbers are filled in, and which, decide how difficult it is.

You may already be familiar with Sudoku from newspapers, or you may have succumbed to the temptation of an electronic Sudoku machine, a small calculator-like device that creates random Sudoku. I have seen those things but never tried Sudokum before. My loss. Anyway, I doubt you will find anything as eminently comfortable as Dr Kawashima's Sudoku. It comes with a number of pre-made Sudoku of gradually increasing difficulty. But the most impressive is the user interface. The grid shows on your touch screen. When you tap one square, it expands to fill most of your screen, while the full puzzle slinks over in the other window. In the large square you can either write the number in large hand, and it will fill the square, or write smaller, and it will be stored as a small number in any of the 9 positions inside the square. You can have many small numbers in each square - in fact, any of the numbers that could possibly be correct. Then you rub them out when they no longer fit because you have discovered that number in the same row / column / box. Just write a O over them, and they are gone, until you have the correct answer.

I am not sure Sudoku really is better brain training than, say, Tetris or Minesweeper. And it breaks with the pattern of short, quick, varied exercises. But it sure is fun. As long as you do it in addition to the other exercises, it can't hurt. Well, except for eating up your free time, including your journal if any...