Brain Age

So, tonight I picked up Brain Age for the Nintendo DS tonight. It’s a fun brain exercising game that has taken Japan by storm, so I hear, and it’s finally got a port to the US. Plus, it’s only $19.99 and has Sudoku on it, so it’s a win-win.

The first thing that Brain Age does when you fire it up, is to meter your Brain Age. It does this in one of two ways. It asks you if you can speak or not. For the heck of it, I ran two checks, one with speaking and one without.

The speaking test displays words in colors, and has you speak aloud the color of the word, and not the word, but then the words themselves are also the names of the colors. The name of this test is the Stroop test. Here are some examples:

• Blue
• Yellow
• Red
• Black

When I ran this test, it told me that my brain age is 55. The optimal age is 20. It was frustrating, because it registered two or three false positives. It turns out, I was speaking a little loudly, and the mic distorted.

The second test was known as Calculations x 20. The basic premise is that simple math problems are displayed, and one has to write down the answers as quickly as possible. The faster you accurately finish the 20 problems, the better. Each wrong answer has a time penalty, so accuracy is important. All of the problems really were simple. Here are some examples:

• 9 x 3
• 7 – 2
• 11 + 5
• 4 x 0
• 9 + 4

When I ran through this test of brain age, I scored a 20 — the best score.

Not that I expected some DS game to properly evaluate my mental capabilities, but it was quite amusing nonetheless.