Page 12 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

In Japan the concept of brain training has taken off and become a major
industry with the Nintendo game Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old
is Your Brain? selling millions of copies in the Japanese market alone in its
first year. The idea is that you play a series of daily tasks involving logic
and maths and are rated with a ‘brain age’ to see how your brain gets
‘younger’ depending on the mental agility you show as you become better
and faster at the games. The brand has since been exported, as well as
widely imitated, and brain-training games are now available as console
games, mobile phone applications or even good old-fashioned books.

There are just a couple of provisos, though. The first is that with all the
emphasis on older adults there isn’t so much data on benefits for young
people and the second is that, as with any specific learning task, you’re not
training the brain to be a more intelligent brain—just one that’s better at
completing the tasks it’s being set. Which leads some to wonder whether
the goal of their grey matter is to leap over the hurdles Dr Kawashima
chooses to set in its path.

HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU…
You don’t need to buy a Nintendo or indeed any branded brain games
to give your grey matter a good going over. A lot of ‘brain games’ are
simply variations on classics like crosswords and Sudoku, so give those
a try. Many scientists think that stimulation is the real key.