Keep Your Brain Active

Mensa tells that he’s more intelligent than 98 per cent of the UK. We’ll never hear the last of it…

It was a dramatic, chance encounter. The editor of Computeractive caught my eye as I nervously crept through the office. He told me that a reader by the name of Hally Hardie had emailed him to recommend me to Mensa. How could I not be flattered? It turns out, though, that the reader meant a trip to Mensa’s website ( www.mensa.org.uk/iq-tests), as part of the ongoing quest to try and boost my ailing brain. I can’t say there are many Venn diagrams where the words ‘Simon Brew’ and ‘Mensa’ intersect, but nonetheless I took Hally up on her offer.

Things started badly. The first brainteaser on the Mensa site had my brain handing in its notice. I quickly jumped to the online workout instead ( www.mensa. org.uk/workout). Here, you’re given 15 minutes to answer 18 questions. ‘Good luck’, the site offers cheerily, before promptly asking you for your email address and some personal details (amusingly, it checks you’re a real person by asking you a maths question so easy a dozy ferret could answer it).

Admin done, you get a basic test, but a reasonably taxing one – a mix of shapes and words (see screenshot below). It’s clearly designed to push you towards paying for a full Mensa test. But I was ecstatically happy with my score of 94 per cent (which Mensa said placed me in the top two per cent of the UK population), so I had no incentive to tackle harder questions and see my score tumble. Friends, I admit I took that 94 per cent and ran.

I felt the Mensa site was more weighing my brain than boosting it, so I went hunting for tools that could increase my intelligence. I landed at the richly acclaimed A Clockwork Brain on the Microsoft Store ( www.snipca.com/26753).

The exercises themselves are instantly graspable, but also cunningly fiendish. Click pictures that match the main image? Easy! Solve some anagrams? No problem! Match the silhouette (see screenshot above)? Er, more of a problem. As the difficulty level escalated, I feared Mensa may track me down, demanding its 94 per cent back.

Everything the Mensa site lacked in gloss, this has. You may need to switch off the part of your brain that’s irritated by characters designed to guide you through games and/or American spelling, but that aside, even the free version is terrific (there are some in-app purchases, but you can ignore these and still enjoy the games).

Also, the assessment screen at the end gave me statistics to dig into. What brain doesn’t like manipulating a few numbers to make them feel better? As a result, I’ve gone back to this game more than anything else I’ve tried so far while writing this column. I was so impressed that I braved the ‘People also like’ recommendations underneath it. It led me to downloading Brain-training 2 from the Microsoft Store ( www.snipca. com/26754).

My brain, full disclosure, instinctively distrusts any menu with ‘Comic Sans’ as its font of choice. Worse, a pop-up tells me I’ve been using the app for a while and wants feedback, when all I’d done was change one setting. Next job was to turn off the awful music, before landing at a fairly primitive exercise in repeating shape sequences (see screenshot left).

It’s free, thankfully, as you’re not going to get more than 20 minutes out of this. The app’s description says “you will find a new model of brain training”. You won’t. And you can trust me on this. I’m, er, apparently one of the most intelligent people in the country.

I was happy with my Mensa score of 94 per cent, so had no incentive to tackle harder questions