One of the gadgets I got this Christmas was a Nintendo DS Lite with the Brain Training game. I wanted one of these because as I’ve got older my memory and concentration levels seem to have got worse over time and I wanted a fun way to stop the rot.

An example of this is at a recent dinner party with family one of my brothers mentioned that he had been on holiday in Turkey. I told him that we had been their too and he asked where we went. I asked my Girlfriend and she couldn’t remember either but we did agree between us that it was probably a couple of months ago. I told my brother that he was lucky we could remember going there at all but where we went was too much to ask. That’s how bad things got.

Anyway, I plugged it in and went to the quick play to find out my brain age. In this mode it just gives you a rough idea and I was horrified to be told my brain age was in it’s 80′s. Bearing in mind the lowest score and best you could get is 20 I was mortified.

So I duly went through the training programs and did a more accurate test to be told my brain age was 78. An improvement but still a worry.

After about a week I have managed to get that down to 34 but there is still a long way to go. I’ve found that I have got a mental block on my 8 times table so simple questions like 7 x 8 I get wrong quite often. It’s strange because I know the answer to 8 x 7 so I am now learning to reverse the question to answer it faster.

I have a couple of issues with the game. It has trouble recognizing my number 8′s when I write them which causes my scores to go down when in reality I did get the question right and the letter recognition is hopeless in my case so when you have to remember 20 words and write them down afterwards it sometimes takes 6 or 7 attempts for my words to be recognized properly which again keeps my score down.

All in all though it’s quite fun to do and worth the effort. It certainly has helped me so far.

Posted in Gadgets