The Science
This article was written by Dr Ellen Poliakoff and Dr Donna Lloyd who are lecturers in the School of Psychological Sciences at Manchester University.
The brain has 100 trillion connections joining billions of nerve cells. Most tasks we perform in everyday life involve a network of brain areas (imagine the London Underground). A common misconception is that we only use 10% of our brains – this is not true. Even a very simple task (like making a cup of tea) involves a diverse number of skills and brain areas, from movement (picking up the cup) to memory (remembering where the tea is kept), to timing (knowing when to check the kettle). When you read about what skills you are using to perform the different games on ‘Brainbox Challenge’ you may be surprised that they all involve a number of skills as well as the primary skill which they are designed to test. Some of them are similar to tests used by psychologists to measure cognitive performance (how you think).
By performing tasks we can strengthen the connections between brain areas (a bit like when you lift weights at the gym to strengthen your muscles) and improve our memory, language and problem solving abilities. You will probably see improvement if you practice the games, but the jury is still out about whether this will improve your cognitive skills in general – there is as yet no scientific proof for the link between playing brain training games and a better performing brain in everyday life.
You may find that if you play the games on different days, you are strongly influenced by how you feel on the day; amount of sleep, coffee and food and stress can all affect how well we perform cognitively. For example, you might notice that you make more mistakes, like forgetting why you went from one room to another, when you are tired or stressed.
Games:
In Shaping Up, you need to be able to break down the complex shape into the shapes that make it up and then match those to the ones at the side of the screen (it might help if you can remember where they are). Recognising the shapes involves your temporal lobes, the part of your brain just above your ears and processing areas of space involves the parietal lobes at the top of your head.
There is some overlap with this game and the Embedded Figures Test, which was developed in the 1960’s, in which people are asked to extract a simple geometric shape from a complex and confusing background. There is some evidence to suggest that males are (on average) better at the Embedded Figures Test than females. Being good at this task, however, is thought to reflect a particular style of thinking (being able to break things down into their component parts), rather than being ‘better’ overall at thinking. You will probably find that if you try this out on a number of friends or family, some of you will naturally find this task much easier (and more enjoyable!) than others.
Practice on Shaping Up may help in a number of ways, for example, learning to see that edges can be shared between different shapes, but also familiarity with the shapes themselves may speed up your performance.
Sphere and Now is testing a number of different skills and people should find it challenging. Firstly, you need to be able to use spatial skills to rotate the letters and match them from one sphere to the next. To do this you might use a particular kind of memory, visuo-spatial memory, which is the kind that allows us to hold visual images in memory. Or you might rehearse the order of colours of the word you need to find (red, orange yellow etc) and use that to find the target word on the opposite sphere. Because the spheres are moving, you will also need to predict the speed that the spheres are rotating, so you can keep track of a particular segment or switch your attention to a new segment of letters. This is the kind of skill you use to judge the speed of cars, when crossing the road.
All these skills involve ‘working memory’, a temporary memory store which allows us to juggle perceptions, memories, speeds and concepts in order to perform a task. Depending on which method you use, you will use a different part of your brain. Using visual imagery will involve the occipital lobe, as the back of your head, whereas using speech will use the temporal lobes (just above your ear) on the left side of your brain. You’ll also need to use your frontal lobes (above your eyes at the front of your brain) to pay close attention as the letters move fast and to help you search out your target words from all the other distractor words.
The main skills that Word Matrix tests are your language ability and your lexicon (the number of words that you know). Those with strong verbal skills may even be able to guess some of the upcoming words, just by looking at the ‘core’ letters on the screen.
It does, however, also test your ‘executive function’, which is controlled by your frontal lobes – this is at the front of your brain, above your eyes. Executive function is your ability to control what you are doing; a key aspect of this is to be able to switch quickly from one task to another, to both engage with the new task and stop doing the old task. For example, in Word Matrix it might be hard to resist reading (and thinking about) one set of letters, even when it becomes obvious that it does not make a word. A classic test of this skill, used by neuropsychologists, is the ‘verbal fluency’ test. People are asked to think of as many words as they can beginning with a particular letter (like F) and then switch to another category, for example thinking of as many animal words as they can.
There are two strategies for playing Five a Day; either to visually encode the value of the fruits, remembering where they were on the screen (if you have a very good visual memory) or to rehearse the names of the fruits in order so that you can then match the value to the order in which it appears in the sequence (if you have a better verbal memory). Depending on your preference, you might use the part of the part of working memory called the visuo-spatial sketch-pad (for the temporary storage of visual images) or the phonological loop (for the temporary storage of speech-based information). However, most people rely on their verbal working memory more, but do try using your visual memory as a backup.
The visuo-spatial sketch pad uses parts of the brain involved in vision and spatial processing; in the occipital cortex (at the back of the brain) and the parietal lobes on the right side of the brain (at the top of your head, above the occipital cortex). The phonological loop uses parts of the brain that encode speech in the frontal and temporal lobes (just above and around the ear) on the left side of the brain.
In decoding the words, it is important to work quickly and to be able to use your working memory to keep the information about the code active. A similar task, called the digit-substitution task has been used traditionally to measure intelligence – people are given a code and must translate as many symbols to digits as they can in 90 seconds. It is thought to measure information processing speed and it was originally found that people performed best at this task when aged 18-21 years old.
However, this only covers part of the skills required in this game. There is an element of strategy – how do you use the picture clue? Some people just decode the first few letters of each word and guess what they could be to minimise their time – this might be a good strategy in a 2-player game as you are more likely to beat your opponent’s time. However, there is a risk that your guess may be wrong. And finally, you are using your language skills in recognising (or guessing) the words.
There is a strong working memory element to Total Recall. You could rehearse the pattern of images you see (using inner speech and activating the phonological loop) or you could use visuo-spatial working memory to remember the pattern of the pictures highlighted. But, be warned, some patterns are harder to remember than others (particularly if the items are highlighted more than once!) Also, the patterns change every time, so you’ll need to forget (or inhibit) your memory for the previous sequence to avoid getting confused.
The brain can typically store up to 7 items in its temporary or working memory store, which is why most people find it hard to remember mobile phone numbers. So, as you go up the levels you should find it much harder to remember the order of the pictures you see. You might find it easier to remember the sequence if you break it up into chunks (as you might do with a phone number). You only need to use your short term memory to remember as many of the images as possible. Facts that we need to remember eventually get moved to a long term memory store. This game is similar to a task used to measure working memory function called the Corsi blocks test; you are asked to watch someone tap a sequence of wooden blocks and repeat it back in the same order. Often people cannot manage more than 6 or 7 items – see if you can do any better!
At first glance Vowel of Silence is an apparently simple game, but you’ll soon realise there is more to it than meets the eye! Not only, does it require you to have good language and spelling abilities, but you will also need to be able to recognise parts of words and patterns (so great for all you crossword buffs out there!) You also don’t get long to type your answers, so you’ll be relying on your motor skills (and you won’t get any points if you mistype your answers). Tasks like this involve a trade-off between your speed and your accuracy.
Your everyday experience with certain words will play a strong role in this game. If you play with someone else, you will probably each spot some words much more quickly than the other. It might also help if you try reading the words out loud as certain words are more defined by their consonants than their vowels. And remember to think about double vowels and vowels at the start and end of the word.
Pairs in Squares is a novel take on the more familiar card game ‘pairs’ or ‘concentration’. A pack of cards is laid out face down on a table and the players take it turns to turn over two cards to see if they match. The aim of the game is to find as many matching pairs as possible before the other player. In the Brainbox Challenge version of the game, instead of remembering the location of pictures on the cards, you need to remember the sounds associated with a particular card.
This requires you to use associative memory processes (involving your temporal lobes, just above your ears) to link the visual location to a specific sound. This involves bringing together two of our most important senses – hearing and sight. Information from your ears arrives at your auditory cortex (in the temporal lobes) and information from your eyes arrives at your visual cortex (at the back of your head, above your neck). Then later on, this information is joined together, like linking the sound of someone’s voice to their face.
The aim of ‘Sum it Up’ is to complete a sum, part of which is presented visually on the screen in front of you and part of which you can hear through your computer speakers. This might sound easy, but the sums are given at the same time; you need to calculate one sum and hold that in working memory, whilst calculating the other sum and then bring those two pieces of information together to produce the final answer. So, although one of the core skills this game requires is numeracy, there is much more to it.
Like ‘Five a Day’ another dual task game, ‘Sum it up’ involves you using your two temporary memory stores; the visuo-spatial sketch pad and the phonological loop to store the visual and verbal sum. Depending on your preference, you might use your verbal memory to store the sum presented through the speakers first, before calculating the visually presented sum and then adding these together. Or you might complete the two sums in the opposite order. Coordinating these different tasks (and not confusing the numbers you see and hear) relies on your ‘executive function’, which is the ability to switch between tasks and coordinate simultaneous tasks. This function is controlled by the frontal lobes, situated at the front of the brain just above the eyes.
If you have trouble getting to grips with an ordinance survey map, then this is the game for you! The challenge here is to move around a compass in either clockwise or anticlockwise directions. Just as many people find it hard to remember their left and right, many people confuse clockwise and anticlockwise. And even if you find that easy, as you increase the levels the game gets a lot harder. For example, the compass will start to move and the points of the compass will disappear. This means you have to track the start point with your mind’s eye, whilst simultaneously reading the instructions about where to move.
You can cheat by placing your mouse over the starting point, but this wouldn’t test your visuo-spatial memory abilities. Similarly, you could just count the number of compass points from the starting point to the end point, but this won’t work as you increase the levels and the number of points you need to move before the time runs out increases. Instead, a much better strategy is to learn how many points there are on the compass between the major points of North, East South and West and use these as a quick guide. For example, if you know that there are 8 points in total, you can simply subtract 8 from a larger number of moves.