Brain Trainers: Hi-Tech Calisthenics
Video games can be more than brain candy. Mounting evidence suggests that keeping the brain active can keep it healthy—staving off the effects of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly, counteracting ADHD in the young, and enhancing memory, attention, and motor skills for everyone in between. As researchers debate how well shoot-'em-up or Sudoku skills carry over to other tasks, multiple companies rush to cash in on the hype.
Brain-Optimizing Options
- Brain Age, for Nintendo DS
The Promise: Based on the work of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. Stimulates the brain with math, reading, drawing, and reasoning tasks.
Price: $20 from Touch! Generations
The Brain Fitness Program, for Windows The Promise: Forty one-hour listening sessions help you improve the speed and accuracy with which you process and recall what you hear.
Price: $400 from Posit Science
MindFit, for Windows The Promise: The interactive system "learns" about users through their performance and offers individualized cognitive training schedules.
Price: $150 from Vigorous Mind
Brain Fitness, for Windows The Promise: Strengthens your short-term memory, language skills, concentration, and ability to decipher, classify, and order concepts.
Price: $65 from Scientific Brain Training
Crossword Puzzles The Promise: Keeps you entertained on the subway
Price: Cost of a newspaper
—Matthew Hutson
Less Than Human
All men may be created equal, but our brains don't believe it. Two Princeton University researchers examined the brain activity of 24 people as they viewed photographs of various social groups. It turns out we stereotype the elderly and disabled as "high warmth, low competence," which inspires pity, but nonetheless activates a "social" part of the brain we use to think about people. Photos of homeless people and drug addicts, on the other hand, activate regions associated with disgust instead. Our brains barely register these outcasts as human.
—Dawn Stanton
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