| Train Your Brain - 60 Days to a Better Brain |
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| Reviewed by Ceri Balston | |
| Wednesday, 25 June 2008 | |
   By Dr Kawashima  Like the body, the brain needs exercise. Dr Ryuta Kawashima, world-renowned professor of neuroscience at Tohoku University and the expert behind the bestselling computer game Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training (which became the perfect excuse for adults to by themselves a Nintendo DS Lite), has dedicated his life to researching exactly how we can make our brains work better.Train Your Brain - 60 Days to a Better Brain, has been developed for people who suffer from increasing forgetfulness, and have difficulty remembering people’s names, spelling words, or expressing thoughts. It is also useful for people who wish to develop their; creativity, memory skills, communication skills, and who wish to slow the mental effects of ageing. The red area on the pictures indicates increased blood flow to a particular part of the brain and interestingly the two activities that caused the biggest increase in blood flow were reading out loud and solving simple calculation quickly. We also found it particularly interesting that thinking and solving difficult calculations hardly registered any brain activity at all, so it’s just as we always thought, thinking is overrated! Before setting out on the 60 day training course the book asks you to evaluate your pre-frontal cortex. It sounds fancy but don’t worry, there’s no need to book yourself in for a MRI or CAT scan just yet. There are three simple tests in the evaluation; counting from 1 to 120 out loud as fast as you can (clearly pronouncing all the words of course), a word memorisation test where you’re given a list of 30 words and two minutes to memorise them before then writing down as many as you can remember. The final test is a stroop test, a really brain-aching exercise that contains a list of words (red, yellow, green, blue) written in different colours, you’re asked to say out loud the colour the words are printed in, not the word as it’s written, again the time it takes you to complete this test is the key. The day after you complete the pre-frontal cortex evaluation you begin training and each day for five days you answer approximately 65 simple maths calculations as quickly as you can. Again, expect some brain ache! When you’ve completed five days of training you then get to evaluate your pre-frontal cortex once more. What is nice about this book is that your progress can be tracked on a handy pull-out “My Brain Training Chart” contained at the back of the book, so you’ve got hard evidence of exactly how smart you’re becoming, just in case no one believes you. Now we’ve only been ‘training our brain’ for a few days so far so it’s difficult to gauge the impact it’s had but what we can say is that completing the training each morning before starting the day’s work did help our brains to wake up far more quickly, which is no bad thing in the Harmonious Living office, I can tell you. So we’re looking forward to another 50 or so days of training and seeing just fit our brain’s become! Also available in this series is Train Your Brain More. It follows the same format as its predecessor giving you another 60 days of brain training. |
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