Ever worry that your weekend "extracurriculars" are destroying your brain cells? Thanks to the work of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, you can give your mind the exercise it needs with the Nintendo DS game "Brain Age." Kawashima is at the forefront of Japanese research on brain imaging and turned that research into a video game, which, played daily, could increase your brainpower.
Like the rest of your body, your brain needs exercise. "Brain Age" functions as a training tool for your prefrontal cortex, which Kawashima calls the control tower of your brain since it controls how the brain uses stored knowledge. Through daily training of the prefrontal cortex, Kawashima believes that you can increase your intelligence.
Nintendo recently stated that its targets include the casual gamer and even the non-gamer. "Brain Age" is great evidence of this philosophy in action. Players utilize the user-friendly stylus for all the activities in this game. While your grandmother might be confused by the typical video game controller, even she can use the DS's stylus.
The training programs consist of simple math problems, reading aloud, and basic deduction (like determining how many people are in a house by watching them rush in and out). Often the goal is to finish as quickly as possible.
The reading program may slow some players down, however, or at least warrant a slower re-reading due to the high quality of passages presented (just today, I read a passage from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"). As incentive to play every day, Kawashima rewards you with more training programs for practicing frequently.
Beyond the training programs is the actual "Brain Age" test. Kawashima determines your brain's "age" based on how well you do in three random tests. Your results can range from 20, the ideal brain age, to 80, meaning that your brain is running as well as an 80-year-old man in the Boston Marathon.
Kawashima may ask you to speak aloud during the test. Answer yes and he administers the "Stroop Test," where you are expected to say the color of a given word. The word on screen might be "yellow," though its color is blue. This proves to be one of the trickier tests of the game, as the microphone sometimes has trouble with voice recognition.
Another test, Word Memory, can be similarly frustrating. The game gives you two minutes to memorize 30 words; you then have three minutes to write them down. The frustration begins after trying five times to write the letter "K" to see the game recognize it as "X." Slight software problems aside, the game runs very smoothly.
If you have three friends play the game, you can look at graphs of your scores to see who has the fittest brain (thus satisfying the competitive side that every Bowdoin student has). "Brain Age" is so accessible that even your parents, or perhaps our beloved professors, can enjoy it. As an added bonus, "Brain Age" contains 60 SuDoKu puzzles?a great time waster. Add in the portability of the DS handheld, and "Brain Age" is a revolutionary game that everyone should look into purchasing.