Sunday 2 September 2007

Pic of the day: Must turn on my Nintendo DS once a day! Because that's where Brain Training (Brain Age) is. Konata probably has other reasons though, since this "game" is for the grandparent generation. Including me. (Hey, it could have happened!)

Brain training continues

A bit over a month ago, I wrote about a new game, or not quite a game, called Brain Training (or Brain Age in the USA, probably someone already had the rights to Brain Training there.) Even though it runs on a handheld game console mostly popular among children and teenagers, it is squarely aimed at the grandparent generation. It promises to keep the brain young by training the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in making decisions. (Actually I recently read in the Scientific American theme issue about growing up, that this part of the brain works overtime in young people. When you mature, the brain distributes the workload more evenly among different parts of the brain, so you can achieve the same results with less effort.)

Old friends will know that me starting something does not mean me completing it. Not that Brain Training can really be completed... it is more of a maintenance task really. After a year your statistics run full so you have to start over, but this is not really a problem. It will take some days before you again have access to all your favorite brain training tasks, but that's pretty much it.

I still have almost 11 months left before that, but I still train my brain every day. It is just a few minutes a day. The system is set up that way on purpose: Unless you make multiple accounts (you can have up to 4) you will only be able to do each exercise once a day. This is probably a good idea, to keep people from burning out, but there is one exercise that I feel is simply too short. Oh well, there are others that I feel are too long or too irrelevant. You CAN play the Sudoku all day if you want, but I have other hobbies too. It is a surprisingly fun little puzzle, though.

So, how is my brain doing? Up and down, I guess. It seems to vary in some kind of irregular wave motion between 20 and 30, only rarely touching the outer limits of this interval. Generally the results are poorer at work, even in the middle of the lunch break. Is it because my brain is multitasking, scanning for coworkers that might barge in with some problem? (It is anybody's guess when I have lunch, both sides have kind of adapted to this. If I want them to not barge in, I go outside.) Or it could just be that my brain has adapted to the slow motion of state bureaucracy... ^^

But even at home, I am not guaranteed to get a brain age of 20 (the best possible score). It is actually quite rare. 22, 23 or even 26 on a bad day are more likely. The first couple weeks the trend was fitfully downward, but now there isn't really a trend. My results get better for a couple days, then they get worse for a couple days.

Some things seem to make a difference, though. In addition to work, there is exercise. Generally, a walk of roughly 400-450 kcal (according to my pulse watch) seems to give the best results. But is this because the brisk walk causes blood to flow through my brain, or is it because I take these walks when I am feeling energetic anyway? If I have slept poorly or simply am not feeling any surplus energy, I am likely to skip the walk. Not a big surprise if I also have problems concentrating on mental tasks.

One possible clue is the day I decided to take a longer walk than usual. I burned like 700 kcal, and did miserably on the Brain Training test afterwards. Evidently too much of a good thing is not wonderful after all!