Letters to the Editor
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The graphic is gross
The giant brain with arms and legs grosses me out. How does it eat? The crack down the middle makes it look like a giant, wrinkled ass. Also, brains look like walnuts. So it looks like a walnut ass. How does a brain eat walnuts? Would that be like cannibalism? I am so confused. I need to exercise.
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Oh it will just cause Autism
Like everything else. Give up and moulder.
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Do you really want to shuffle off this mortal coil fully conscious?
or would you rather be wacked out of your mind?? That's natures way.
Free and legal drugs of any type for anyone living in an old folk's home and who has retired his or her's drivers license.
Me for President! ; )
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Sure you can control for the placebo effect
Before the second test, tell the testees that the exercises they've done CAN improve performance by up to 10%, there for you've made the test 10% harder. Tell another group it's the same test, and a third that the test is 20% harder. Give them all the same test.
Do the same for people who haven't done brain exercises and for a group who did an educational course, whether studying Greek, literature, math, or quantum physics. And, since some of this testing seems to test reaction time, a group of people who have spent time playing video games.
It sure would be interesting to know if scientifically designed and tested brain games improve performance more than hours playing Super Mario brothers.
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Somewhat disappointing
I'm a long time Salon reader, but I've been a bit disappointed recently with some of the articles. This one for instance, seems like a class essay on the placebo effect when the headline indicates it's about the brain-fitness programs. There's almost nothing insightful about the brain-fitness programs in the article, only skepticism and the difficulties of clinical study. I already knew that it's difficult to measure cognitive improvement -- what did I learn about these products?
There was an article last week about incandescent vs. compact fluorescent lights, and that one also seemed like a recycled college essay.
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Why is PBS promoting this scam
I was glad to see this article; but I think it could have been harder on PBS. I, too, saw one of these fundraising things on PBS, and I was very disappointed that PBS is promoting this. The main point of the promotion is to get elderly contributors roped into buying stuff from this outfit. (Contributors get a "free" gift worth "hundreds" of dollars.) It gives the appearance of PBS corporately endorsing an informercial.
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That damn fist comment from Hutman.
Now every time I visualize the grey-pink matter behind the cranial skull bone.... thanks to Hutman. er. Yup.
Some of the Salon readers might now visualize a walnut? A friend of mine, one day just having a snack about small talk matters, brought to my attention the opened, split peanut. Her favorite part of a nut is the little raised part between the inside part of a open-cracked nut. Yummy. Look @ a nut some time.
She showed me a little gummy 'worm'?
She said it's the best nutty part to eat.
`It's not really a candy gummy worm.
*
`If the world seems depressing to me,
`I'll find the little twirled part. Open carefully.
`Then crisscross, after the treat, the two legs.
`Who can afford $200 for a Brain Fitness Program?
` She even has a theory about why Ladies cross legs differently?
`Males must eat right, and sit comfortably to have mental health.
*Invite a pleasant friend to visit you?
`Of all the worldly worries I shall shed.
`The hermit hut is enough fun for two.
P.S. I enjoyed a no ~ brain fitness article.
Buy some chewy gummy bear yummy treats
`
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first, not fist. First.
sorry. I'm eating pancakes
I'm using one hand to type.
The other is all wet and buttery.
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Cognitive workout software is a hobby of mine
I have been experimenting with what you might call cognitive workout software for years. I have found two software programs that work.
The first is supermemo, a sophisticated flashcard program with a spaced repetition algorithm based on a phenomenological model of the user's memory. It's popular among foreign language and medical students. It also has an "incremental reading" function, intended for coordinating the reading of up to thousands of online documents. The designer of this program is an elitist: he refuses to create a simple user's guide.
The second program is called brainbuilder. This can be used to improve digit span, which is correlated with mathematical ability. It takes discipline to stay with it.
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Why buy expensive games when you can play Pac Man for free?
Read the New York Times Book Review; then read some the books. Listen to Mozart or Mick Jagger. Better yet, watch Mick Dance and dance yourself. Do what you love and what you have to. Really work to find out the truth and then work hard to figure out whether truth exists. Do something real with your brain, senses and body. Do hard things and things you don't want to do. All those things work for your kids, and they will work for you. Try to think clearly. Forget what you want to think. You'll get old anyway. You might even like it.
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stroke victims do it all the time
but it requires effort - and mr burton was too lazy to even try the exercises (he merely scanned the site)
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Brain games
There are only two brain games I have used over the years, chess and 'GO'. Usually, however, I have to play these with a computer because my wife loses against me, and therefore hates both!
Apart from that, I read in some issue of The Economist a while back that games like 'Sudoku' are largely a waste of time, and it's much better to push your brain toward a specfic intellectual goal. For me that's in plasma physics research, and also some celestial mechanics. (I always love to get out my old folders, notebooks and go through the conditions for ion-acoustic waves and the Koretweg deVries equation, not to mention using Kepler's eqn. to locate the position of Mars in 2077.
Those are the sort of activities that keep the gray matter sharp, not trying to fit a sequence of numbers onto an array in different directions. (Which in any case, would only activate a few neuronal assemblies at a time, since the activity is basically the same each time - only with slight variation in order, sequencing)
What we do know, is that adherence to religion and religious beliefs rots the brain and results in atrophy of many different regions. After all, one simply ceases to think and takes virtually everything on "faith".