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.

Training My Brain

Yesterday, 'cb' at Fighting Monsters mentioned the brain training experiment that the BBC are running, and being a curious person late yesterday evening I had a look at the relevant pages on the BBC website and decided to join in.

I've decided that I will try to take part in this experiment for as long as possible. Not for me, the training three times a week for six weeks. No, I shall try to stick it out for the year that the experiment runs, and I will try to do the training every day.

I suppose that I have a vested interest in whether this training really does help in keeping the horrors of dementia at bay. I live on my own, I already have mental health problems, and I like to think that I have an active mind and a useful memory. But as I get older I am already finding that my memory is not quite what it was. It takes me longer to put names to faces and vice versa, and the frequency with which I think that I must do something and then forget what it was that I was supposed to be doing is increasing.

I have already been a little surprised at how I have fared at some of the test that I have done. I fully expected anything that involved the manipulation of numbers to be difficult; I have significant problems with numbers and I know that I do. However, that does not seem to have been a particular problem so far, and I have managed to carry out all of the tests (whether they involve numbers or not), except one, with relative ease.

It will be interesting to see whether my scores improve over time; with some of the tests I think that the testing is not so much about training the brain as one's level of manual dexterity. Will the days that I am more depressed make a significant difference to how I score or are there sufficient variety of tests for my 'personal type' to counteract any influence that this may have? The questionnaire that you complete before embarking on the experiment is more in-depth than many that you may come across, and it is significant that mood over the recent past represents a significant proportion of the questions.

I believe that this is a worthwhile piece of research that all of us over the age of 18 who have regular access to a computer and the Internet should take part in. It will be interesting to see the results of the experiment and see if there really is any evidence to show that brain training works.