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Nintendo Keeps Wits and Reflexes Sharp
PreacherTom writes "While not definitively proven, the concept that video games can stave off mental degradation in the elderly is gaining favor. 'Nintendo ... boast[s] that Brain Age was developed with the help of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a respected Japanese neuroscientist whose face pops up at the start of every game. Kawashima believes brains can be kept young and nimble through the rapid repetition of simple mental challenges. The game is wildly popular in Japan, and 4 million copies have been sold worldwide since Brain Age was introduced 15 months ago.'"
...did we even need another one?
This post reads like an advertisement.
That is a no brainer.
Why is this being treated like it's a new issue? It's been known for years that keeping yourself active mentally keeps your alertness level up. Video games have been the subject of a lot of reports that the continual hand/eye coordination and continual exposure to numerous stimuli, like video, audio, reaction times, puzzle solutions, and so forth, keep the brain active and responsive. There are studies that eldery people who play things like crossword puzzles on a regular basis are generally more alert and have a better mental capacity than others their age who don't engage in such behaviors.
.. oh why .. is this news to anyone?
For crying out loud! Even Ronald Reagan thought during his presidency that the continual hand/eye coordination and quick thinking that were necessary with video games were good at keeping kids mentally alert! That fact that this dates back to RR means that this is 20 year old information. (Yeah, yeah, I know that he was a republican and therefore a target for knee-jerk, Slashdot ridicule, but no comments about ketchup or alzhimers, all right?)
Why
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I believe it. I had brain surgery to remove a minor tumor, it was supposed to be completely safe and undamaging, but the surgery didn't go well and I ended up with a brain injury. I had terrible problems remembering words, and reading was very difficult. What pulled me through was playing Boggle on my computer. I figure the word game helped me reactivate my damaged memory pathways, and retrained me in pattern recognition. I still suck at Boggle, but I always did, even before the surgery. But now I seem to be back to my previous levels of literacy again, and the computer game helped me get there.
Is there an alternative to this "Brain Exercise" game for the PC? Brain Age sure looks interesting, but I'm not going to buy a console just to be able to play this one game (I know that Nintendo wants me to do that, but I don't have the money).
I know that PopCap Games makes great puzzle games from time to time, but are there any others? Maybe open source, even?
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
Hey, you can't speak on my behalf...
My mom did it on a steady diet of Super Mario (Brothers/World/64/Sunshine), Banjo-Kazooie (and sequels), and Ice Climber (and occasionally Wheel Of Fortune). Before the NES it was Astrosmash and Lock 'n' Chase for the Intellivision, and occasionally Jumpman for the C64. She and I both agreed that the mental stimulation and the hand-eye coordination required to keep playing kept her mind sharp, even if she needed me to get past the really tough parts.
I sat there, stylus in hand, wondering if the grim visage greeting my own was there to offer me more drugs, train my brain, or steal my soul. I reluctantly pressed the start button, and then the horror began. Numbers, symbols, some unholy language. What did it all mean? I had to get to the bottom of the mystery that was rapidly sucking the vitality from my already wizened exterior.
Before I knew it, I was naked in the street, shouting about demon doctors and magical mushrooms. The plumber, THE FIREBALLS OF ETERNAL DAMNATION.
Then it occured to me: When the nurse came with my daily dose of anti-psychotics, I had tried to swallow her and thank the friendly pills for my daily dose of nuturing.
Maybe I should put my clothes back on.
of course not. i see this all the time; it's as if millions of gamers cry out in complaint about zonk and are suddenly modded to 0.
maybe we should've mixed a bit of sony hate with our loving criticism. in case you dont know what im talking about read all the posts that were modded to 0.
No, it's not a porn site. It's a 70 year old lady who's been playing video games for 20 years now. www.oldgrandmahardcore.com. It's funny to watch her swear like a sailor when playing them.
Is there an alternative to this "Brain Exercise" game...?
Read Jane Eyre or Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton? Play tennis, golf, ping-pong? Learn to play the ukelele? Study Latin? Get together with friends to play bridge and argue politics?
It seems hardly surprising that playing video games is better than simply allowing your brain to rot. But I'd be equally surprised if playing video games is better than the more obvious and traditional ways to stay active as you age.
TFA dated September 25 2006. The author apparently has either found a time machine or hasn't been playing enough Brain Age!
Great, now I'm going to have nightmares of really old people playing Dance Dance Revolution.
While our claims are definitively not proven, we welcome suckers who give us $$$. You might as well concentrate on moving your thumbs around each other to get the same result.
I prefer Big Brain Academy to Brain Age. I found the handwriting recognition in Brain Age hit and miss, reading my 4s as 9s half of the time. In the Stroop test where it uses voice recognition, I have to repeat the word "Blue" frequently as it usually doesn't understand it the first time. The game is still fun though, but it would be less frustrating and I would have a higher score if it wasn't for those shortcomings.
On the other hand, Big Brain Academy doesn't rely on voice and handwriting recognition, and also has more excercises. If I could pick just one of the brain training games, Big Brain Academy would be my choice.
Maybe you're pronouncing "blue" with a heavy french accent, "bleuh".
(Yes, I know it doesn't take an H at the end in french.)
Now is clear what im gonna get. If you need help deciding wich console to buy you may want to check this out.9 /aid/61571
http://wii.qj.net/Spoof-The-PS3-And-The-Wiii/pg/4
Eye opener!!!!!!1111!uno
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
As others have posted, using a variety of games, or even certain non-gaming activities, can give the same benefits as Brain Age. However, after using Brain Age/Big Brain Academy for several months I can safely say the two games are far more effective because they are specifically designed for this purpose. I'm a pretty die hard gamer myself, but after a month of using Brain Age I began to notice a marked improvement in how quickly I could mentally respond to a given task. This wasn't something I just noticed myself, some of my friends and co-workers even commented about how sharper I seemed.
Of the two games, I think most people would enjoy Big Brain Academy more because it feels more like a game, while Brain Age feels more like homework. However, I found Brain Age to be the better of the two simply because its math games are great for people who want to improve their basic math skills.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
I had the same problem, but found that if I say bluuue instead of blue it understands it just fine.
Experts in cognitive chronometrics and also neuroplasticity have long held these views, but research conducted in the past 3 years and published supports the contention that you can enhance your brain...building a cognitive reserve through 'education' and cognitive training. Some of the gains in BrainAge are due to the practice effect, as are some of the gains in chonometrics, but it also seems that greater attention, speed, and focus capability is a direct result, e.g., your coding is likely to be both faster-to-production and more accurate. a good link for G and ECT's (Arthur Jensen) is here. A free game is here. The historical legacy goes back to Terman.
Why waste time with this Nintendo crap? Go buy gramps a copy of Total Annihilation or some other good RTS (or wait for the upcoming Supreme Commander) and REALLY put his mind to work. If he really plays it "real time", he'll be honing some good reflexes. too.
I didn't even know there was a Silent Hill for DS. Sweet!
Well I'm glad you seem to be "back to normal"... The notion that you can have brain surgery to remove a tumor, and it being "undamaging", is, well, "quaint". Neurosurgeons speak of "eloquent cortex" (cortex that is obviously doing something useful) and "non-eloquent cortex" (brain that you aren't obviously using and won't miss if removed), but it is of course just a euphemism, and a bedtime story told to unknowing patients. The fact is that you are using ALL of your brain -- it ALL has a function, some parts much more poorly understood and less obvious than other parts. So of course ANY brain surgery is going to cause brain damage, by definition. And in the case of tumor removal, you want to make as wide an excision as you guess the patient can tolerate to make sure you get it all (you didn't say what kind of tumor it was, but some tumor cells are extremely nasty and are exceedingly efficient at infiltrating normal brain tissue over many *centimeters*). So in your case, it just sounds like the surgeons misjudged, in an obvious way, the boundaries of "non-eloquent cortex", though it is really a fiction anyways. I'm glad it seems like Boggle helped in the recovery process, and maybe it did. However, the brain also does have a natural time course of "recovery" that can take months or years. Since the brain cannot regenerate new brain tissue, the apparent recovery of function is largely due to rewiring, with normal, undamaged areas taking over and subsuming functions of the damaged regions. This process takes a lot of time. Whether Boggle actually helped is debatable, but the recovery process worked for you... sometimes it doesn't so well, and the deficits persist.