Day Three of our one week Brain Age Challenge is a go and it’s time to make some adjustments.
As a quick reminder, on Day One I started with a Brain Age of 60, but have now gone up to 65! Can I get it lower?
This time, I have a plan…
Pre-Brain Age Training
So I didn’t exactly forget, but the Switch alarm I’d put on at 2pm reminded me to boot up the game with its cute little buzzing and flashing Blue light around the home button.
Before I went in today, I’d decided that I wanted to do a bit of training before taking the test. Just to see if it made any difference.
I started out with Calculations x25 and I didn’t do too bad. There were no mistakes and I had a time of 1 min 4.03 which is my best yet and surpassed my first time of 1 min 12.00.
To follow up, I did Dual Task again, but this time made a couple of mistakes which added 15 seconds to my time. A shame, as I ended up on 1 min 7.01 and had I not made those silly errors, would have topped my previous 1 min 0.53 second score. Ahh well!
Because I had a third stamp on a third consecutive day, the game unlocked another new training game for me – Masterpiece Recital. Basically, you have a touch screen piano in front of you and you have to tap the keys that match the notes on screen.
It’s a rhythm game ultimately, but you also have to be a bit aware of what you’re pressing and the time it takes you to press. I do think this would be better suited as a horizontal game as it seems a bit ‘lean’ and cramped when you’re holding vertically.
I did ok for a first time out, hitting 15 wrong notes out of 73 and ending up with a score of 75 points. It’s a fun little diversion and it can help you gain a better appreciation for music and placement of notes.
To end my training, I did a Reading Aloud section, which was my slowest yet at 5.5 syllables – my highest was 6.1 – and my first readthrough was 45.51 seconds with the second being 41.44.
I stumbled over some French words in there and the way the writing was laid out was a bit trickier. But it’s still not a bad way to warm up.
I feel prepared, let’s Brain Age!
Brain Age Test
Today’s Self Control test was the Rock, Paper, Scissors test with the IR Motion Camera. Reluctantly, I thought I’d try and give this a go again!
Admittedly, it felt a bit better than last time but it still doesn’t track me properly. It keeps losing the tracking of my hand and because it tries to speed you through the hand changes as quickly as possible, it sometimes clocks my previous gesture for the current question. And that may not always be appropriate.
Still yet to be convinced by this. As soon as it unlocks in training, I’m going to give this a proper run through and try to figure out what’s going on.
I got speed counting for the third day in a row. 1 to 120. Was hoping for something different here, especially after my first game, but this was my best result yet at 44.25 seconds. I comfortably smashed my best time of 50.18 seconds. Repetition helps, I guess.
And to close, it was my arch nemesis, the word memory test. Fortunately, this was a much better performance but still lots of room for improvement. I got 11 of 30 compared to my previous total of 5.
The way it interprets some of my words is still a bit concerning and probably slowed me down just a little, but not enough that it affected my performance this time. I tried a different strategy this time of actually remembering three lines across, as well as speaking aloud some of the other words. It seemed to help as I did better overall.
Because of that, my Brain Age is now 54! That’s a huge jump from yesterday where I’d dropped to 65! This was helped massively by my Processing Speed, which it reckons is that of a 25 year old!
As expected, the thing that let me down was the Rock, Paper, Scissors test which, to be fair, seems more to do with the camera than it is for my performance. I probably could have got an even better score if the tracking had been better. It says I had an age of 80. Dr Kawashima needs to pop round my flat and play me in the flesh!
Because of today’s activities, my short-term memory also shot up to 56, which had previously been 80. Happy with that.
So I’m now +18 of my real age. Real progress is being made and doing some training beforehand certainly seems like it might have helped. They always say a good warm-up is important.
I decided to skip Germ Buster today, and instead do a solitary Sudoku puzzle. Sadly, I still made a solitary error – really annoyed about it as well – but I completed the maze in 35 mins 4.64 – remember that 20 minute penalty for the mistake!
That’s Day 3 done and there’s a real noticeable improvement. Can I keep it up? Will different games see me get an even higher score? Tune in tomorrow to find out!
