Keep your brain active Simon Brew tackles Mensa
What’s ageing, balding, and has an IQ of 107? Simon Brew tackles Mensa’s tests, then sends an urgent massage to his brain
Since it debuted before Christmas, the aim of this column has been to fine-tune my ageing brain. I’ve invested a lot of time into this experiment, but no money. Until now. Let me explain how I found myself a fiver (and some) down, but not feeling much smarter.
The first outlay (£1.99) went on the official Mensa app ( www.snipca.com/ 27349), available for ipad and iphone, but not Android (come on Mensa! Android users want to boost their brain too!). The app’s bright presentation belies the agony of its brain-battering exercises. There’s a short test, giving you five minutes to answer five questions. Survive that, and you should tackle the full test, available in short (20 questions), medium (40) or long (60) versions. You can skip questions you don’t know (a button I found very handy) and return to them later.
The questions are full-on Mensa fare, asking you to spot patterns, determine opposites and complete sequences. If you can answer the test in the screenshot above right, you should score pretty well. My IQ score of 107 was notably lower than I’d achieved taking other tests. Either Mensa is lying to me, or everyone else is trying to make me feel better. I was offered (and declined) the chance to compare myself with others on the Global Leaderboard.
Charging double Mensa’s fee is Brainturk ( www.brainturk.com), which aims to “elevate cognition” in adults and children. For £3.99 over 40 brainexpanding games are downloaded to your Android or IOS device.
They look a little old (the most recent version was released in 2016), and the instructions leave a lot to be desired: “arrange disks in user stacks as in target stacks”. Er, OK, if you say so.
The activities themselves though are interesting. Take Math Asteroid Addition (note the American refusal to pluralise ‘maths’), which is like an old arcade game – typing the answer to a sum blasts your alien foe. This is easy when there’s one on the screen, slightly more taxing when there are lots. Odd Man Out, meanwhile, is a simple game of spotting which of the many shapes on a screen doesn’t fit (see screenshot below left). To add a bit of complexity, some of them are spinning.
The games can be a bit hit and miss, and I could live without having to register to see my progress - I’ve already paid four quid! But even an old grump like me couldn’t argue it wasn’t value for money.
Anyway, after all the brain stretching, and the umpteen cups of coffee to deal with the pressure, my head inevitably hurt. I thus went back to my PC to try the intriguing-sounding Brain Training Acupressure ( www.snipca.com/27350) for Windows 8 and later.
The idea is that you can boost your learning by prodding traditional Chinese massage points on your body - such as between your eyebrows (see screenshot above right). I wasn’t convinced, so opted for the free version. My reward for sitting through the adverts was a video of a woman pressing the side of her head, with around 30 words of explanatory text.
The program lets you set a reminder to give yourself a daily massage, and a link is thoughtfully provided for you to say thank you to the program’s creator Dr Jakob Bargak on Apple’s App Store. A more helpful link, I’d suggest, would be to Youtube videos that do all this better.
The questions are full-on Mensa fare, asking you to spot patterns and complete sequences. I found the question-skipping button handy