Brain Training

A month ago I wrote about taking part in the experiment that is being run on the BBC website relating to brain training. I have been pretty good at remembering to carry out the exercise, having managed to complete 27 out of a possible 29 sessions.

My average score is rising slowly, but it can definitely be influenced by which three of the six possible exercises I am required to carry out on any particular day. Three of the exercises I find relatively easy, one a little more difficult, one I have some problems with, and the final one I find almost impossible.

I do not carry out the daily brain training at a specific time of day; I do it when I think of it when I am actually sat at the computer. Sometimes it can be early in the day and sometimes it can be very late at night. It doesn't seem to make much difference to my scores.

I have come to realise as I become more familiar with the exercises that it is very difficult for me to increase my best score on any particular exercise; I seem to have already reached pretty near the maximum that I am going to score for each one. I am able to make this observation because I very rarely get any big red crosses for my selected answer, it is usually a big green tick.

This has led me to ask myself how I can improve on my scores. If I am regularly getting the same or almost the same score for any given exercise, what can I do to score more highly? The result has been for me to consider registering again under a different name and trying to do the exercises on a different computer. You see I generally use my laptop, and all my brain training has been done on it. This means that I am using the touch pad to move around the screen to make my selections; however, if I were to use my PC, I would be using a mouse for the exercises. Would this make a difference to my scores and would I get quicker each day or would I simply reach my top speed after a few days and then just vary my scores by one or two each time I did a particular exercise?

It seems to me that the brain training is less a case of improving my brain's ability to determine the correct solution to the exercise but rather a test of my manual dexterity. I think I shall use this opportunity to carry out a little experiment of my own.