In recent weeks, three new brain training games have arrived on store shelves, each one promising to give us neural networks of steel. There’s “Hot Brain” and “Practical Intelligence Quotient 2,” both playable on Sony’s handheld PSP. And then there’s “Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree” for Nintendo’s new Wii console.

Full article here.

But do these games really work?

Like most things in life, the answer is both yes and no. New and stimulating activities, including these video and puzzle games, can help you “use it” in lieu of “losing it.” So in that regard, yes they can help.

But once you’ve played a particular game enough times so that the activity is no longer novel, it loses some of its potency. In part this is addressed by offering a variety of games and puzzles. Ultimately, though, these games are not much better than the typical fare you can play online, often for free, at least as far as brain-training is concerned.

Don’t neglect your 9 IQs

We all have those 9 IQs: spatial, verbal, math, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic, naturalist and spiritual. These types of games typically offer spatial, verbal and math style puzzles. That leaves two-thirds of your intelligence untapped.

If you really want to help “train your brain”, learn to play a new instrument!

Make new friends, write an article or life story, take up bird-watching, solve an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle (or a new-fashioned 3D puzzle), play a sport, read something complicated. To train your brain, you sometimes have to STRAIN your brain. Just like a muscle, you’ve got to push your brain beyond its comfort zone and it will respond by making new connections and strengthening existing neural networks. That’s why most video games, television shows and pulp reading don’t help. Their too easy.

To train your brain, you sometimes have to STRAIN your brain.

Training executive function and attention, two vital higher-order skills, is a different story, and the Nintendo Wii doesn’t have anything to genuinely fit the bill. There are some games that we use here at Sparks of Genius in our Electronic Playground that you can use at home. You’ll find them on this page.

So work your brain hard…and if you’re a teacher or parent, then work your kids’ brains hard, too. They’ll thank you for it later (if they don’t forget)!

Good luck!
Allen Dobkin

All wrong.

In a new biography, “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” Walter Isaacson explains how good a student Einstein actually was. He was a good student, did not fail math and in fact had mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.

But he did not like the mechanical regimentation and mechanical learning of the German schools, comparing elementary school teachers to “drill sergeants” and high school teachers to “lieutenants.”

When he moved from Germany to Switzerland at the age of sixteen, Einstein spent a year at a school that emphasized independent thought, free action and personal responsibility. He thrived in a learning environment without rote drills, memorization and force-fed facts.

Based on the philosophy of a Swiss educator named Pestalozzi, the school helped students move through a series of steps from hands-on observations to intuition, conceptualization, imagination and visual imagery.

“Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly,” wrote Pestaslozzi, and “the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated.”

Spatial intelligence has been defined as “the ability to think in pictures and to perceive the visual world.” Dr. Branton Shearer, a member of the Sparks of Genius Community, explains it as using the imagination to think in three-dimensions, transform one’s perceptions and re-create aspects of one’s visual experience.
One with high spatial awareness can solve problems of spatial orientation and moving objects through space.

http://miresearch.org/mitheory.php

Remind you of anyone? It was at this school that Einstein, age sixteen, started picturing what it would be like to ride along a beam of light.

To learn more about the 9 intelligences in our 5-4-9 formula, visit http://sparksofgenius.com/sparks.html

-Dr. Rohn Kessler