I see so many of them around today but I am always skeptical of the scientific validity of them. I’m happy to pay a reasonable amount and I greatly value privacy. Main thing for me would be trying to improve memory.
Any recommendations are appreciated! If I need to go out and buy a DS and a copy of Brain Age, so be it.
Learn a language! There’s been a lot of research in language learning being greatly beneficial for your brain. It’s also an incredibly useful skill to be able to communicate with more people
Also learning an instrument!
I second this. I hate the direction Duolingo is going in but it’s still useful to me. I took two years of Spanish in highschool. Then ~10 years later took up Duolingo and have been learning more. I don’t think it’s useful starting from scratch. Also I don’t think if you’re serious about learning a language that it is a replacement for real tutoring or real conversations, but it prevents you from getting stale.
Here’s what I do on my phone most of the time nowadays:
- Practice sudoku @ sudoku.coach
- Practice chess @ Lichess
- Practice Japanese @ renshuu.org
I almost got rid of all of my doomscrolling with actual brain activity. It feels great, and having different topics to choose from helps break the monotony.
Based on Kvashchev’s experiment: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7709590/, high school students appear to have gained about 10 IQ points in 4 years by taking his creative problem solving course. If you’re using IQ as a measure (for fun? Not sure your goal here) you could read up on him first.
I’d suggest regularly taking the Mensa IQ test, I suspect over years your score will improve, slightly and with great effort.
I don’t believe this will have any effect on your life, however. You’d be much better off learning a skill. A language, instrument, or artistic endeavor will bring you orders of magnitude more satisfaction, happiness, and bragging rights. If you’re thinking about career success, just work or study more. If you’re treating creative problem solving as the hobby itself, that’s cool too.
For memory, look up pegging and other techniques. Begin by memorizing your credit card numbers, etc.
All games can be brain training games, just depends on what you want to train.
going to become a genius by mastering atari’s ET
Take this course. You can do it for free. At least that was the case a couple years ago. Free version does not provide certificate of completion.
Really worth the time and effort!
Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects
I would say:
- Reading books
- Playing chess
Both can be done on a phone I suppose.
Or just do them on a computer and stop being a peasant.
I have never been able to read a book on a computer. It just feels completely unnatural, even though I read a ton of articles, forum posts, manuals, etc. on my phone or computer. Not a peasant because they could historically usually not read let alone afford a book, but I do love actual physical books.
Same! I’ve read 1 (one) book in my life on a kindle and hated it. Physical books are just really cool, or maybe it’s just preference because that’s what I grew up with.
An actual e-ink Kindle or a tablet pretending to be a Kindle?
Nah it was a real e-ink kindle. It just wasn’t for me i guess.
The only thing “brain training” games train, is your ability to play their game. There are no games that make you smarter or improve your memory in everyday life. And the ones that say they do are the ones you need to stay away from.
Portal & Portal 2
And if you’re really feeling masochistic, Portal Reloaded
I’m trying to 100% the achievements in Portal without guides, and I’m doing the challenges now but I have never felt so fucking stupid.
Portal rewired my brain for a fairly long time. I was really thinking in portals. No game has influenced my head like that. L4D didn’t have me seeing zombies everywhere.
Your brain gets good at what it does. There’s a bit of skill transfer here and there but overall, training your brain on brain training games trains your brain to play brain training games. Practice what you want to get good at
Factorio will challenge all of your mental capabilities
It breaks me mentally but I can’t stay away… I NEED THE CRACKTORIO!!
the factory must grow!
I would say reading books. It’s a long form activity that is a strong counter to the brain rot of scrolling and being mindlessly entertained by 100 different things for 10 seconds each. I find that when I read I have more vivid dreams which I think is definitely a sign that my brain has been fired up.
I started using Neuronation and am pretty happy with it so far. It has quite a bit of challenging tasks (math, quickly building words, logical thinking, memory training) you need to do. They test you one time to evaulate your skills and then the training is started at your own level. Normally you do it 10-15 min /day. They also seem to treat data privately and since the company behind is based in Germany they would have to comply to GDPR anyway which gives further protection. Got suggested to me from a friend which also has ADHD. His psychiatrist recommended it to him, so it seems to be mainly used in this context and also scientifically backed. I pay ~50€/year. Also I use it in German, but I’m sure it’s also available in English
Tetris. IIRC there are some very positive studies backing it. There is even something called the "Tetris Effect" (not the game).
Almost all lack generalizability to everyday life with the skills they purport to target and improve. In other words, you may get better with your, say, reaction time in the actual “game” but that doesn’t mean you’ll experience a transfer effect in your reaction speed globally in day to day life.
