For the past couple of weeks, I've been playing a game called Brain Builder, which claims that it will literally make you smarter. There is actually some research to back this up, and after playing the game for a while, I'm starting to believe it myself.
The basic concept is pretty simple. The game consists of a grid of nine squares (like a tick-tac-toe board). The game will display a blue square in one of the spaces every few seconds, accompanied by a spoken letter.
Your job is to press the buttons on the bottom of the screen if the position of the blue square or the spoken letter matches what was displayed or spoken previously. If the job was to simply match the previous position or letter, the game would be trivially easy for anyone over the age of three. However, you have to match based on not the very last item, but the one that was 2 back. The match may be to the position, the spoken letter, neither, or both. That's it!
This deceptively simple game is really, really hard. When deciding if the latest item matches, you need to temporarily skip over the previous item and match to the one that's two back in the sequence. But you can't forget the previous item, because it will be two back in a couple of seconds! In this way, you need to keep three things in mind (the current, the previous, and the two-back), and keep shifting the old ones out of your memory and the new ones into their new positions. Even so, this would be relatively easy if only one thing needed to be remembered. But the visual stimulus (position) and auditory stimulus (letter) need to be separately remember and weighed in your decision, since they may match or not match independently. These combinations of challenges make it very difficult. I've gotten better at it, but it's still very challenging. It really feels like a workout!
What the game is really exercising is your working memory and your attention. If your attention wanders even slightly, you will start messing up, and it's very hard to get back on track. I can already feel that my powers of concentration are improving as a result of playing this game.
The version of the game I'm playing, from developer High Secret, has its flaws. For a non-free program ($1.50) it should really have a volume control and an Android menu. It also has no levels. What I've described is the whole game. It's been plenty for now, and will continue to be plenty for a while. But I just learned that other versions of this game (generally called N-Back) are available, and this one from developer Philip Nguyen, has a 3-back level, and is free. I will certainly be trying this one soon. There seem to be iPhone versions as well. Search for "brain n-back" in the App Store.
I definitely recommend this type of N-back game for anyone who wants to use their gaming time to feel like they're actually improving their brain!
