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Game keeps your brain young as you grow older, writes Vumani Mkhize

“WHAT is your brain age?” This has become a familiar refrain among scores of people who are hooked on Nintendo’s Brain Training game.

With more than 20million units sold since its 2005 launch in Japan, the game has become a worldwide phenomenon. Based on Japanese neuroscientist Dr Ryuta Kawashima’s research on dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, the game allows you to measure how old your brain is and it provides fun and simple mental exercises that “decrease” your brain age. According to Nintendo, Brain Training stimulates the mind and trains mental awareness and one’s long-term memory when a person simply plays the exercises for a few minutes each day. When you start playing the game it asks you to perform a few tasks involving arithmetic and remembering certain words. Depending on the speed and the accuracy of your answers the score you receive becomes your initial brain age. Once you receive your brain age the game sets you a daily regime of tasks such as arithmetic challenges, reading out loud and remembering number sequences; all of which are said to improve cognitive function. The game’s built-in calendar tracks and records your progress, and by obtaining certain scores you unlock further brain challenges.

Brain Training is addictive. You become transfixed by the seemingly menial tasks. I was embarrassed by my brain-age score when I first played the game. Being 23 I was quite confident that my brain’s age would surely corresponded with my real age. How wrong I was. The game prompted me to shout out various colours into its in-built voice recognition microphone. This seemed easy enough, but I was tricked and here’s how: the word red would flash onto the screen, but the colour would be blue. The mind automatically wants to read out the word red, but I had to constantly check myself because I had to shout out the actual colour of the letters and not the word red. I failed miserably at this task, and this was the task that determined my brain age, which was calculated at a geriatric 76. I was shocked, but through playing the game more frequently you become accustomed to some of the challenges, and you become better at them. I know this because the game has a graph that charts your daily progress, and by observing the vertical line indicating my improvement in some of the tasks, it’s evident that I’m getting better.

In what Nintendo describes as a “non-game” the basic principle behind Brain Training is that the more you play and the better you get at it, the lower your brain age becomes. Kawashima’s theory is that as one ages so does the brain. He also believes that the brain’s optimum performance is at age 20 , thereafter it starts to decline because of the rigours and routine of adult life. Brain Training claims to bring your brain age down.

“Nintendo has taken a whole step away from gaming, we’re all about a healthier lifestyle, and this game does this by keeping your brain fit,” said Mathew Devine, Nintendo’s training co-ordinator: Of the game’s interactivity Devine said, with Brain Training: “You’re interacting — this has never been done before, where you are actually physically getting involved in a hand-held console game, and that’s what makes it so much fun.’’