Survived the '60s? You May Want to Try This Nintendo Game
There's nothing aging baby boomers worry about more than losing their mental sharpness in their 40s and 50s. As names, faces and phone numbers become harder to remember, many boomers try to find ways to halt or even reverse the process.
Now, Nintendo, the Japanese game giant, is hoping to cash in on this trend. It aims to get American boomers to start doing brain workouts on its popular $130 Nintendo DS hand-held game machine, which is more likely to be seen in the hands of teenagers.
On April 17, the company will bring to the U.S. a $20 game, for the DS player, called Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!
It claims to be able to assign anyone's brain an "age," and then to reduce that age through a bevy of digital training exercises. These mainly involve rapid-fire math problems, reading drills and language challenges. A second title, Big Brain Academy, will be released May 30.
Both games have been big hits for Nintendo in Japan. They are based on the theories of a Japanese brain researcher named Ryuta Kawashima, whose animated face adorns the program.
As an aging boomer myself, I thought I'd give Brain Age a try, and have been using it for five days. I found the mental exercises in the game to be fun and stimulating, though they have a serious flaw I'll describe later. After less than a day of "training," I was able to reduce my so-called brain age dramatically. But between the actual exercises, Brain Age is peppered with corny and patronizing messages.
Before I describe Brain Age in detail, a major disclaimer is in order. This is not the health column, and I am no expert on brains or mental health. I have no idea whether the concept of a brain age is valid, or whether this game can actually improve your memory or mental skills. Nor do I know if it's better, or even as good, for you as simply doing a crossword puzzle or sudoku game on paper regularly.
Brain Age doesn't require manual dexterity. It doesn't even use the usual game-control buttons. You carry out the brain exercises by writing answers on a screen with a stylus, or by speaking into the built-in microphone.
The program has numerous features, including a Quick Play module to show off the basics of the exercises; a Graph module that displays results; a Sudoku module with 100 sudoku puzzles; and a Download module for playing wirelessly against other Nintendo DS users.
The heart of the game is divided into two parts: Brain Age Check and Training. You start by checking your brain's "age" by completing as many as three tests. In one, you must write the answers to 20 simple math problems. In a second, you must memorize and then write a long list of words. In the third, a well-known puzzler called the Stroop Test, you must say aloud the color in which a word is written, rather than the word itself.
All three require you to answer as rapidly as possible, as speed is of the essence in the Brain Age program.
My favorite of these was the Stroop Test. In rapid succession, it puts up the names of colors -- "blue," "red," "yellow" and "black" -- but these names are written in colors different from what the name signifies. For example, the word "yellow" might be written in blue type. You're inclined to simply read the name of the color, but you're supposed to say the color of the typeface.
On my first brain age check, the program assigned my brain a pathetic age 11 years older than my chronological age -- something I suspect is deliberate, to scare players. After a few hours of training drills, I knocked that brain age down 26 years, to a number 15 years younger than my chronological age. By the end of the day, I was given a brain age of 20, the youngest possible. This didn't inspire confidence in the program's scientific accuracy, but it sure was fun.
Next, you're supposed to do training exercises daily, and there are a wide variety of these. New ones are added as you go along. They include a math-calculation race, counting and reading out loud; a number-and-letter maze, a game where you count the syllables in phrases; and another where you have to keep track of a rapidly changing group of people moving in and out of a house.
The big flaw in Brain Age is its reliance on speech recognition and handwriting recognition. In each exercise, I lost points and time because, in a few instances, although I wrote or spoke the correct answer, the DS misinterpreted it as a wrong response, or else couldn't decipher it at all.
Then there are those patronizing messages, accompanied by a creepy bobbing image of Dr. Kawashima's head. He makes lame jokes about the weather, advises you to eat lots of carbohydrates and tells you that "your brain is rippling with raw brainy power." At one point, he lets me know that "the setting sun sure does put spots in my eyes." Huh?
Brain Age is fun and invigorating. I'm just not sure it'll return the brains of boomers to the pristine condition they exhibited before all that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
大脑青春不老？试试这个游戏吧
青春不再的婴儿潮一代最担忧的恐怕就是在四、五十岁的时候思维不再敏捷，头脑开始迟钝了，别人的名字、面容和电话号码越来越记不住，很多婴儿潮一代都在尽力寻找减缓甚至逆转这一过程的秘方。
现在，日本电子游戏行业的巨头任天堂(Nintendo)正希望顺著这股趋势赚上一把。该公司希望自己的畅销产品、往往在青少年手中传递的、价值130美元的任天堂DS手持游戏机能吸引美国的婴儿潮一代客户，开始做脑部锻炼。
今年4月17日，任天堂在美国推出了价值20美元的DS游戏机游戏，名为大脑年龄(Brain Age)：每天几分钟，锻炼你的大脑！
这款游戏声称能给每位玩家的大脑测定“年龄”，然后通过一系列的数码训练游戏减少“年龄”，主要是快速数学计算、朗读练习和语言挑战。第二套系列产品“大脑学院”(Big Brain Academy)将于5月30日推出。
这两款游戏都是任天堂在日本市场的热门畅销产品。产品设计的基础就建立在日本大脑研究员Ryuta Kawashima的一系列研究理论之上。他的动画头像也出现在游戏里。
我自己也属于婴儿潮一代，所以觉得应该试试“大脑年龄”。玩了5天之后，我觉得，游戏里的思维练习很好玩，也很刺激，不过也有不少缺陷，这个后面再说。“训练”了不到一天，我就能大大降低所谓的我的“大脑年龄”了。但是，在那些游戏里，也不时可以看到迂腐和自以为是的信息。
在详细描述这款产品之前，我要先做一个重要的免责声明。本专栏并非健康专栏，我也不是大脑或者思维健康方面的专家。我对大脑年龄这个概念是否正确一无所知，对这款产品能否真的改善用户的记忆力或者思维能力也一无所知，它是不是会比定期做报纸上的拼字游戏或数独游戏更有效，还是一样有效，这些我统统不知道。
“大脑年龄”并不需要你有一双灵巧的手，甚至用不著通常用来控制游戏进度的按键。你只要用笔在屏幕上写下答案，或者对著内置的麦克风讲话就行了。
这套游戏有很多功能，“快玩模块”展示练习的基本信息；“图形模块”显示练习结果；“数独模块”里有100种数独游戏；“下载模块”可以帮助玩家通过无线方式与其他的任天堂DS玩家竞赛。
游戏主要分成两部分：大脑年龄测试和训练。首先，玩家完成三套测试，以测试自己大脑的“年龄”。第一套测试，你必须写出20道简单算术题的答案；第二套，必须记住一长串单词然后默写出来；第三套：众所周知的Stroop测试，你必须大声说出表示颜色的单词是使用哪种颜色显示出来的。
这三套测试都要求你尽快给出答案，速度也是“大脑年龄”的关键因素。
我最喜欢的就是Stroop测试了。屏幕上迅速转换不同的表示颜色的单词：蓝色、红色、黄色和黑色。但是，这些单词是用另外一种颜色显示的。比如说，“黄色”这个单词可能会用蓝颜色表示。人们往往会念出单词，但实际上游戏要求你念出的是这个字的颜色。
我第一次进行大脑年龄测试的结果很悲惨，游戏认为我的大脑年龄比我的实际年龄大了整整11岁，这事儿我觉得可能是故意的，要吓玩家一跳。玩了几个小时训练游戏之后，我就把我的大脑年龄降低了26岁，比实际年龄小了15岁。到了晚上，我的大脑年龄已经降到最低值──20岁了。这并不能激起我对这套游戏科学精密程度的信心，但的确很好玩。
接下来，玩家就要每天做练习了，各种游戏应有尽有。一边玩一边就有新游戏加进来，包括：算术比赛、计算和大声朗读、数字和字母迷宫、数出一个词组里的音节数，还有一种练习，你不得不紧紧盯著进进出出一所房子的人群。
这款游戏最大的缺陷就是要依赖于声音识别和字迹识别。每一套练习里，我都会丢掉几分或者被扣掉一些时间，就因为我虽然写对了或者说对了，但DS理解错了，要么就是没看懂或者没听懂。
还有那些自以为是的信息，伴随著游来飘去、令人生厌的Kawashima博士的头像。他开著蹩脚的玩笑、建议你多吃碳水化合物、告诉你“你的大脑泛起阵阵智慧的涟漪”。怎么样？
不过，大脑年龄还是很好玩很刺激，我只是不能肯定它是否能把婴儿潮一代带回到年轻岁月。
