Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Brain training?

I'm currently doing a daily dose of Brain Training via Lumiosity.  Whether it can actually be called "brain training" is under discussion after the US Federal Trade Commission earlier this month announced a settlement with Lumosity over charges that advertising its games as "brain training" and that they were designed to improve cognitive skills such as attention and memory and that they were capable of improving an individual's performance on everyday tasks may not be supportable.  Either way, I'm prepared to give it a go after my brother said it was helping him ... and I think there are some games there that do stretch me ... especially with visual memory tasks.  One of the hardest things though is remembering what the rules of the games are ... and yes, mostly I do the traing "daily" but sometimes I don't get to it.  I wonder how much science the FTC would need to see to be convinced that it did support Lumosity's claims.  Maybe it's a matter that the games are "designed" to help with brain training ... and they don't always work. 
Some people don't need to do the training of course ... they just have it.  Like the time my sister and I were peeling potatoes and popping them into a saucepan of water ... and then a potato went in and the water was close to overflowing.  We angsted over how to carry the saucepan to the sink so we could pour some water out until my partner suggest we "take a potato out".  Oh my goodness ... what brilliance!  One of my work colleagues came very close to that level of brilliance yesterday ... we were trying to print out a file which had too long a name - once the directory information was added. We couldn't change the file name, nor copy it, nor get it to do anything really ... every time we tried the name "too long" rewarded our efforts.  Finally, Del solved the problem ... she renamed the folder the file was in!  Bravo! 


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