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Fun Way to Increase Your Brain Fitness

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8 hrs ago
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Although physical exercise helps improve brain health, brain exercises are a great tool for developing or maintaining a mind like a steel-trap.

Lumosity.com is a new site offering a complete brain fitness program. Designed by neuroscientists, their program has been scientifically demonstrated to improve your memory, attention and processing speed.

The program consists of 30 sessions, each session consisting of three to five games, which automatically adapts to the difficulty best suited for your current abilities, getting more difficult as you go along. You can track your advancement and improvement as you go through the program.

Users of the program claim they have experienced clearer and quicker thinking, better memory retention of names and numbers, increased alertness, elevated mood and better concentration while on task.

For example, one game called Birdwatching is designed to improve your peripheral vision. This is an important ability in many everyday activities, such as driving, since having good peripheral vision is tied to a reduced likelihood of having an accident.

Lumosity.com

If you volunteer to help test out new products access is free.

These games are fun, but get a little repetitive after a while. My experience:

Birdwatching: I can almost always identify the letter, and the blue dots rarely foil me, but though I always have the general area of the bird, I seem to be further off center than I'd like.

Memory Match: I really suck at this, despite having played it a dozen times. I lose track of where I am, always.

Monster Garden: I can usually remember where the monsters are, but almost never which colors are where. In general, I'm really bad at tasks like these, and I have no clue how to improve on it (after so many monsters appear, I just lose track).

Raindrops: Not so bad here, but once a trickier problem shows up and there's 5-10 drops on the screen, I'm pretty much screwed.

Spatial Speed Match: Probably my best game.

Color Match: Haven't done this one much yet.

[I removed the long, old, and now useless section of this post.]

I am really liking it.
As ziddy my most problematic game is monster garden, I stil manage to get big numbers but even if it is not a strange thing in me I use tricks to encode it, at about 3rd screen I say screw the colours, if I remember the locations it will be enough, soon I will say screw the locations encode it as allowed and forbiden paths, when there are many monsters there are only a few valid paths and in fact some areas can be declared unreachable.
Well at least the monster game forces me to not use the phonological loop (except at the begining, I store the colors in there linked to the order of apearance of the monsters).
I also guess that my working memory problems are no such an isue as it is evident I am good at finding workarrounds, and perhaps even with such workarrounds in place the training could help.
I also see one problem with bridwatching it ofers an unfair advantage to english natives, the oportunity to guess the name of the bird (even if it is my strongest game and I am scoring arround 5k).

pretty fun. i cleaned up with the arithmetic bubbles, but bombed my first run with monster garden...aced it the next time though. i like the birdwatching game best, but i'm a big scrabble/word buff.

playing games like these really keeps your mind sharp? but i dont FEEL any smarter!?

Pretty cool site. I'm on a laptop, so my math bubble score sucks though.

Havin fun on these, but a dirty mouse is no help on bird watching. And those damned monsters foil me everytime

I just wanted to add that nothing beats mybraintrainer.com. I am not affiliated in any way with them financially but rather I am just a happy member. They just upgraded to a new Mybraintrainer version 2.0 which is sick---> in a good way.


They have 39 different exercises for only $10 for three months. I can attest to the improvement that I've gained since beginning the program. Absolutely phenomenal! This may be partly attributed to my nootropic and supplement use as well though. Who knows?

i also enjoyed the luminosity games and can see how they could potentially be helpful.

this and other exercises have made it pretty apparent that i chose the right field (epidemiology) as i surprised even myself at how easily the quantitative "raindrop" game came to me. although i had some problem with the monster/farmer/radish game, and i had always thought memory was my strong suit?!?

This might be a good way to test how different nootropics have an effect on you. The exercises are quick, and give immediate feedback, and your previous scores to compare to.

I've often wondered why more people haven't done tests like this with their nootropics and other drugs. I know the sample size would just be one person and it'd be harder to setup larger formal studies, but it seems like there's almost no objective testing being done by most of us for most of the compounds that we use. Most feedback is of the subjective "I felt this effect" type, when there is probably an objective clinical test that could be used to measure these effects before and after use, and if not there is probably a measurable task or application that would be a decent fit for testing. I understand most people usually decide to use a substance based on how it affects their overall performance in life, rather than in one specific task, but it would probably be useful for us all if more of us put our nootropics and related drugs through some measurable tests and provided results. Think of all the times a comment of the type "Substance A felt a lot like Substance B, but maybe a little different" or "Substance X was pretty good in this effect" would have been more valuable if it was more like "Substance A changed my performance from baseline on Test1 by this much, whereas Substance B changed it by this much".

http://pebl.sf.net This seems much more suited to the purpose of cognitive testing. The included test battery mimics many commonly used neuropsychological tests, including the Iowa Gambling Task, the Conners Continuous Performance Task (this one in particular was used in my ADHD diagnosis), and the Test of Variables of Attention.