Brain Age on the Nintendo DS -
Can it Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day?
by Alan Pritt
(It will apparently be known in Europe as 'Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training How Old Is Your Brain?' but in this article I'll refer to it as Brain Age.)
In Japan the game has slowly developed into a surprise hit. Aimed primarily towards the previously untapped senior market, it has entranced Japanese of all ages. Even Japanese hospitals are using the Brain Age game to keep elderly patients mentally agile.
This is what Benjamin Turner at Gamespy.com had to say:
The really crazy thing, though, is how the Brain Training software seems to appeal to a broad swath of the population, much of which doesn't normally play games. A few weeks ago we saw grandmas and grandpas lining up in the early morning cold to snag DS Lites -- has Nintendo created a whole new demographic of hardcore gamers?
And Playstation are also going after a piece of the brain pie with their own brain training game:
The DS title was created under the supervision of Touhoku College's Ryuta Kawashima, a researcher who deals with brain imaging. Nintendo apparently forgot to sign Kawashima to an exclusivity contract, as he's now working on a PSP title similar to the DS game: Sega's Nouryoku Trainer Portable (Thought Trainer Portable).
IGN.com
So we know it has popular appeal, but there is still one burning question...
Will it actually improve your brain?
Brain Age was developed in affiliation with Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a Japanese neuroscientist. Kawashima has written popular books on the topic of brain training and it was apparently this that brought his attention to Nintendo. The US title of his book will probably either make you squeal with excitement or roll your eyes in disbelief. Generally 60 days refers not to the fact that you will have transformed your life in that time, but usually more to the fact that it contains only a few days worth of ideas.
The fear, of course, is that the Brain Agegame is going to be another fun, but ultimately unworthy time waster. It's perhaps fun to play, but will it do what it says on the box? Will it actually improve intelligence? Or perhaps the better question would be, will it significantly improve intelligence?
I don't have a copy of the Brain Age to play with, but I can still make comments based on what I know of the game. I won't therefore really be getting into the gameplay, although practically every review agrees that it is a fun and addictive game.
Most reviews comment on the handwriting and voice recognition which is important for the operation of the game. For most of the games you have to use a stylus to write your answer, or have to speak the answer into a microphone. The general consensus is that the handwriting is very accurate, but sometimes the voice recognition is a little off.
The only other negative statement I've really read is this:
Then there are those patronizing messages, accompanied by a creepy bobbing image of Dr. Kawashima's head. He makes lame jokes about the weather, advises you to eat lots of carbohydrates and tells you that "your brain is rippling with raw brainy power." At one point, he lets me know that "the setting sun sure does put spots in my eyes." Huh?
HeraldNet
None of the other reviews attempt to examine the effect these games will have on your intelligence however; so this is the angle I will take in this article.
What is Brain Age?
This is from Nintendo Power:On your first day of exercise, you will take a series of tests and get a score that determines how old your brain is. This number is called your "DS Brain Age". By performing daily exercises just minutes a day over weeks and months, the better you'll get at the exercises and the lower your DS Brain Age will become.
The best possible score is age 20, but it's not unusual for someone of any age to get a score of age 60 or 70. In reality it doesn't mean much and doesn't take long to improve. It's really just a fun way of scoring.
However, it was apparently devised in some vaguely scientific way. The Brain Age was determined by taking a sample of 120 people, running tests, and then logging their scores.
How were the Brain Age games devised?
Brain Age was inspired by the work of Professor Ryuta Kawashima. He was approached by Nintendo to help create a game based on his best selling books.
Having the professor behind the Brain Age is obviously being used extensively to give credence to the game. We can see this particularly in the use of his name all over the publicity and his 3D image even appearing in the game (see image right).
But does this mean the Brain Age actually has some scientific background to it? To work out what games would stimulate the mind most, Nintendo apparently visited Kawashima's labs. Here they used imagining techniques (presumably fMRI) to reveal what questions stimulated the mind most. These images are, in fact, featured in the game.
Whether there was more to their deductions than these I'm not sure. Just because more of the brain is used doing some activities, doesn't necessarily mean it is more beneficial. It's an obvious deduction to make, but it doesn't make it true.
So does Brain Age improve your intelligence or not?
To answer this question, I'll take on each game, one at a time. This won't encompass everything, but these are the games I could find descriptions and demonstrations of.
The Games
Sudoku
First: the infamous Sudoku; a game that did not feature in the Japanese version. Sudoku has recently become an extremely popular puzzle and it is not surprising Nintendo wanted to cash in on it. In fact, it's almost enough to sell the Brain Age game itself.
But does Sudoku give your brain a workout?
Sudoku will challenge you in a variety of ways common to many problems. These include concentration, logic and working memory.
However, the danger of playing one game too often is you will begin to become skilled at solving that kind of specific puzzle, rather than developing the transferable skills. As you become more practiced with Sudoku you will learn patterns that are not easily transferable, and find skills such as working memory and concentration are stretched less. It's worth playing for a while, but try to play other games as well.
Calculation
I think this is probably the most worthwhile aspect of the Brain Age game. Here you can see a video of Brain Age in action. The camera makes it difficult to see what is going on for the first half of the video, but it stays still for a bit longer in the second half.There's nothing particularly ground breaking here, but it is certainly a very worthwhile exercise. Basically you have to do simple arithmetic as fast as possible. The challenge of speed makes it fun and the simple score at the end gives you a simple figure to strive for. I'm hoping they have levels where the difficulty increases, but the space available to write answers suggests it is limited. From what I can see, however, this is a very worthwhile exercise.
I repeatedly talk about the need to get the basics down, and generally the teaching of mathematics is one of the worst offenders for missing those basics. Hopefully if games like this really take off, number sense will become a common quality among the general populace again.
Time Lapse
In this game the player is presented with two analogue clocks. The objective is simply to deduce how much time has passed between the first clock time, and the second. This is obviously quite simple maths again, but something people generally don't get good enough at. This will improve your general number sense slightly, but won't tax you for too long if your maths is pretty good.Stroop Test
You've likely encountered this before. Quite simply a colour name is presented on the screen, but it is painted in a different colour to the one it says. For example,RED
The task is to say aloud the colour it is printed in, not the word. So for the above example you would say blue. The DS machine has voice recognition to interpret your answer. This is important, because for it to be a challenge you have to say it out loud.
Here are some more examples if you want to try it now:
YELLOW
GREEN
ORANGE
BLUE
RED
BLUE
GREEN
So why is this hard and will it actually improve your intelligence in any way? The task is difficult because connections between words and speech are so well linked. The actual colours have a longer path to travel to reach speech. In other words, every time we see a word, we automatically think about how it is said. The colour of the text is usually irrelevant. It is unlikely, for example, that as you read this sentence you are thinking 'black, black, black, black'.
So this task really proves that we do a different task well. It's difficult because we have to inhibit our habitual response. It's here that any benefit is likely to be found. Learning to inhibit habits is an important skill of any intelligent brain. Usually this is one of the first things to go when you are tired.
If you play this enough the likely outcome of this game will be that you will just build a stronger link between the actual colour and its name, which will have absolutely no influence on other skills. You will get better at this game, but transferable skills won't have developed much.
However, it is possible there is more to the game than I am presuming, and it has a way of slowing down or stopping this association. That wouldn't be too difficult to implement, but I do not know for sure whether they have or not.
Syllable Count
Some IQ test questions require you to count syllables, but the difficulty of these questions lies a bit deeper than being able to count. The difficulty is more in recognising you have to count. I must be missing something here, because I cannot even work out what the challenge is.Reading Aloud (for speed)
In this game the player is presented with a sample of text and the task is to read it out loud as fast as possible. Kawashima's own research suggests this helps those with patients suffering from dementia. For people without dementia, I'm unsure whether it will have the same effect. Nor is it clear, how important it is to read aloud.However, I do believe it helps improve our grasp of our language, and improves reading skills by encouraging us to grasp the meaning of a sentence as a whole rather than one word at a time. A faster speed is important if this effect is to be guaranteed. It is likely that other related skills will be challenged at the same time.
It's a good exercise, but if there are any benefits of having this on a gaming device instead of just reading a book, I don't know what those benefits are.
Speed Counting
I'm not sure exactly what this task entails. I've only heard that it involves counting to 120 as quickly as possible. If anyone has any more information on what the task actually is, I would be grateful to know.Connect Maze
In this game you are giving a sequence of letters and numbers, and you have to find them on a the display and connect them together in the correct order. I think this is supposed to train your search and scan abilities, and possibly also to perform basic sequencing. The elements involved are basic letters and numbers, which would suggest this is mainly trying to improve basic sensory perception. This is an engaging task, but I'm unsure how transferable the skill is. I'm going to have to remain undecided about this one, until I've read the research on it.Head Count
In this game a stream of people go in and out of a house. You can't see inside the house, so you have to keep track of the number as people leave and arrive.This is quite simple maths. Someone goes into the house and you add 1 to the tally. Someone leaves and you subtract 1 from the tally. It obviously gets harder as different numbers come in and out at the same time.
As well as encouraging improvements in your basic number sense, this is a great exercise for your concentration. This is definitely worthwhile.
Triangle Math
Here's an example of the problem:
In this task your job is to add 4 and 9 together to get 'a' and then add 9 and 1 together to get 'b'. Then you continue the pattern by adding the value of 'a' and 'b' together to get the answer. This is obviously easy unless you have to do it in your head! The difficulty can also be increased by increasing the size of the triangle to include more elements.
This is a lot more difficult if you cannot do basic sums automatically. Once you can, it is much less demanding. With the right strategy this doesn't pose too much strain on working memory capacity, but it does help you organise working memory in quite subtle ways in order to keep the key data in mind.
Another good exercise.
Low to High
This involves memorising a bunch of numbers and then placing them in order starting with the lowest and ending with the highest. This will help improve your ability to memorise numbers, but will not readily transfer to the memorisation of other items. There are short cuts to memorising numbers such as the major system (which I explain in my eBook which you receive when you subscribe to my newsletter.What I find interesting is that you then have to mentally reorganise the numbers which stops you from grouping several numbers together. So 78-39-27-32 is different to 7-8-3-9-2-7-3-2. I'd say that learning to manipulate data in very subtle ways like this is very much worthwhile. It will reveal weaknesses in the taught memory systems, and encourage you to find ways of making your memorisation more flexible.
Word Memory
This is something else in my memory eBook. It's a good exercise, but again, it doesn't need to be on a gaming device.Drawing
I believe drawing is one of the most important activities for improving intelligence. On this system, however, I don't see the point. I may be missing something here, but I would think it better to grab a pencil and some paper, and just draw! The beauty of computers is that they can provide immediate feedback to help you improve much faster. This works especially well in the calculation game, but drawing has its own immediate feedback loop, so I cannot see the benefit here.Verdict
We seem to be heading in the right direction with Brain Age. This certainly won't turn you into some kind of super genius, but it should be beneficial. I'm most impressed with the calculation game. It's not exactly cutting edge, but if it's fun it will do wonders for your number sense. There are some other games, which should also provide benefits in more subtle ways.Other games, such as the drawing game, seem more suspect. While not totally useless, I think alternative activities would provide the same kinds of benefits but to a higher degree.
It's also worth bearing in mind that this will only take you so far. It's only a small part of the puzzle; a chapter of the story. It can be difficult for skills developed in a specific setting to transfer into wider areas, and I think that will be the case with a lot of these exercises. However, the more areas we engage in to stretch our selves, the more easily these abilities will spread into other areas.
I recommend it like I recommend broccoli. It's a worthy addition to your life, but won't have a dramatic effect if this is all you do. On first impressions I'd recommend it, but it's perhaps not an essential purchase as there are many alternatives.
