I have never played games on Facebook. Candy Crush just wasn’t my bag. Why? Because I thought it was a waste of my time. I do play words with friends because that keeps my brain nimble – and, of course, I am a lover of words. Tonight I discovered a new “brain gym” that is game playing, but has a science behind it.
For awhile I’ve been meaning to investigate the Lumosity add on TV and today I did. I went to Lumosity.com and registered. They asked me about which brain tasks I’d like to improve and then built my program. They are supposed to send me a set of games to play each day that will improve my brain function. After all, who doesn’t need to improve their brain function?
I received my first set of games and I was hooked – hooked like you get on Candy Crush, but these are good for me, based on science, and geared to the areas of memory, speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving I’d like to improve. The best one was where they wrote a color name above a color name. The top one was always written in black and you have to answer yes or no quickly if the bottom one was written in that color. Very cool! Like being addicted to exercise.
As I further investigated the site, you can have a paid subscription to track mood and sleep and access graphs of your progress. The free one keeps track of your points and gives the areas of your brain that you’re most proficient in. I like these games. There’s substance and reason to spending time playing them. We all know it’s been proven that our brains, just like our all of our muscles, need to be consistently exercised outside of the way we use our brain in our jobs everyday. It’s like walking. If that’s all you do for exercise, only the muscles used in walking get exercised and the rest atrophy. Go ahead and try Lumosity. It’s free and who couldn’t use a little free exercise – especially if you can sit on the couch and do it! 🙂
And so, as another day goes by, my brain is doing jumping jacks, I’m having fun, and…I have written.
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