Keep your brain active

Games you can count on

“The public should be fully aware of the benefits – and limits – of training the brain” roared a Daily Mail article in November, barely a week after I’d convinced Computeractive’s hierarchy that this column was an excellent idea. Citing a scientific review of over 35 years of research, the article callously poohpoohed my idea.

But then every week there seem to be articles for and against brain-training. It’s so confusing you’d be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders and burying yourself in a Sudoku book instead. And that brings me to my first game this issue.

Debate rages over whether Sudoku aids memory. There are many games that use numbers in a similar way. The Arrange Game ( www.brainmetrix.com/arrangegame, pictured above), for example, introduces itself with some guff about growing neurons and mental stimulation, before revealing its double identity as Just Another Puzzle Game. It’s an online version of one of those Christmas-cracker puzzles where you have to slide numerical pieces into the right order, and yet somehow it’s even more irritating - mostly because you can’t knock the plastic pieces out, cheat, and rearrange them.

I started at level four, for a four-by-four grid, and the sheer simplicity of it certainly appealed. I’ve always assumed the strategy for such games is to sort the corners first but – with no help at hand – the game just let me suffer and struggle. My brain clearly needs work, I concluded. I switched on the 10-by-10 grid (pictured) for a minute to see how far I had to go, quietly wept, and left the game.

Next, I headed to the Microsoft Store for a free download of the Windows 10 app Mind: Brain Training ( www.snipca. com/26506). This promised to be ‘a unique brain-training challenge’, but it’s actually a collection of well-designed, familiar exercises that challenge you to count flashing squares (see screenshot left) and repeat sequences.

It gives you four exercises. The titles - Calculate, Eidetic, Sequence and Impression - make them sound profound, although I quickly twigged that I was simply counting things and repeating them. Still, treated as a straight game with no discernible neural benefit, I found myself losing a good half hour before realising it wasn’t boosting my brain in any discernible way.

I was determined to find something that would give me a measure of where my brain is at. I was tempted by Num6er Hunt ( www.snipca.com/26510), despite the irksome way it replaces a ‘b’ with a ‘6’. The challenge here is to add up the moving numbers, which is much trickier than it sounds when there are 10 digits floating on screen. Every time I got it wrong the game said my IQ dropped by 10 points. This worried me, because I didn’t have a very large IQ to begin with. To boost it, Num6er Hunt suggested I eat more dried fruit.

I thought it best not to drift into minus figures, so I shut down the whole exercise, and tried not to click the flashing Google advert as I did so. Turns out, I couldn’t even manage that. None of the games helped me in the pub quiz later that evening, but at least they kept my head ticking over when I was supposed to be working.

Every time I got something wrong my IQ dropped by 10 points. This worried me, because I didn’t have a large IQ to begin with