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Stay mentally fit<br />
with brain<br />
-training apps<br />
As new research shows how apps can<br />
help you stay mentally fi t, Daniel Booth<br />
recommends fi ve you should try<br />
We all know that as we get older, we<br />
should try to stay physically active. Well,<br />
the same is true of our brains. We need to<br />
keep challenging that ageing grey matter<br />
to make sure our mental alertness doesn’t<br />
deteriorate.<br />
Do computer games count as mental<br />
exercise? Some medical professionals<br />
have always been sceptical, saying that<br />
the alleged benefi ts, such as boosting IQ<br />
and preventing dementia, have been<br />
exaggerated by game companies in order<br />
to fuel a multi-billion pound industry.<br />
But new evidence suggests that games<br />
really are good for you. In a study funded<br />
by the Alzheimer’s Society, researchers at<br />
the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology<br />
and Neuroscience at King’s College<br />
London found that brain-training games<br />
could have “signifi cant” benefi ts for older<br />
people carrying out everyday tasks.<br />
Th e research involved almost 7,000<br />
adults aged over 50 and claims to be the<br />
fi rst to evaluate the impact of computerbased<br />
brain training on how well people<br />
can perform their daily activities (read<br />
more on the Alzheimer’s Society’s<br />
website: www.snipca.com/18763).<br />
Inspired by this research, here we<br />
recommend five of the best brainboosting<br />
apps. None, sadly, is completely<br />
free - you have to pay to unlock extra<br />
levels and games. But you can<br />
Lumosity tests your memory and problem-solving skills<br />
typically play for long enough<br />
before being forced to pay to<br />
judge whether it’s worth the<br />
money.<br />
Lumosity<br />
Android: www.snipca.com/18764<br />
iOS: www.snipca.com/18765<br />
Probably the best known<br />
brain-training app, Lumosity<br />
is now played by 70 million<br />
people. Th e reason for its<br />
success becomes clear within<br />
minutes of playing: you’re<br />
given a tough mental workout,<br />
testing your problem-solving<br />
abilities and memory recall, but at<br />
no point does it feel like a chore.<br />
It helps that the games are short, mostly<br />
around 30 seconds, leaving you plenty<br />
of time every day to tackle the Times<br />
crossword.<br />
Make sense of this?<br />
Then you should try<br />
NeuroNation<br />
Elevate<br />
Android: www.snipca.com/18768<br />
iOS: www.snipca.com/18769<br />
Elevate’s creator, Jesse Pickard, says he<br />
wants to help you “get to a better place”.<br />
By this he means boost your mental<br />
agility, not pay your moving expenses to a<br />
villa in the south of France. But his<br />
self-help jargon hasn’t put people off<br />
– over 5 million people installed Elevate<br />
within five months of its<br />
launch last year, and<br />
Apple named it the best<br />
iPhone app of 2014.<br />
We can see why. Its<br />
games aim to improve<br />
how you speak, listen,<br />
write and read by<br />
testing your grammar<br />
and increasing your<br />
vocabulary. Everyone at<br />
<strong>Computeractive</strong> is using<br />
it, so buy our next issue<br />
to see if it really works!<br />
NeuroNation<br />
Android:<br />
www.snipca.com/18775<br />
iOS:<br />
www.snipca.com/18776<br />
Th is feels the most<br />
scientific game here, with<br />
the type of questions you’d<br />
expect in a Mensa test. Just<br />
tackling the problems<br />
makes you feel smarter,<br />
regardless of whether you<br />
resolve them or not. We<br />
echo the thoughts of the<br />
2007 World Memory<br />
Champion Gunther Karsten,<br />
who said: “I don’t know any other program<br />
that is equally intensive and effective”.<br />
Peak<br />
Android: www.snipca.com/18773<br />
iOS: www.snipca.com/18774<br />
Sudoku fans, look away now. Th is app<br />
wants you to swap your grid-filling<br />
number crunching for its suite of games<br />
that boost memory, sharpen attention<br />
and develop mental agility. At the end, it<br />
shows your brain “in a nutshell”,<br />
revealing what you’re good at. It showed<br />
that our language skills are fi ne, but we<br />
need to improve our, erm, um… sorry<br />
where were we - oh yes, we need to<br />
improve our focus.<br />
Happify<br />
Android: www.snipca.com/18777<br />
iOS: www.snipca.com/18778<br />
Let’s end by giving our brain a rest and<br />
concentrate on “emotional” fi tness. Th at’s<br />
the aim of Happify, which offers games to<br />
“banish negative thoughts”. You can’t<br />
beat the logic – the happier we are, the<br />
more we’ll enjoy life, hopefully boosting<br />
our physical and mental wellbeing.<br />
Happify claims that 86 per cent of its<br />
users feel better within two months. Email<br />
us in February and tell us if you do.<br />
9 - 22 December 2015<br />
59
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