Brainage

This week's cartoon has dialog courteously provided by Brainage. Brainage is a game for the Nintendo DS that purports to "train your brain," mostly through a series of memory exorcises. One of those exorcises is for the program to ask you a question about a recent activity, such as "what did you have for dinner last night?" It records your answer, then a week or so later, it asks you to recall what you put down. Of course, the program has no way of knowing what you wrote, so it just puts both answers on the screen and lets you decide if you got it right or not.

The plan behind this exercise would be to train you so that you could remember your meals and other trivial decisions from way back. But what it really does is just train you to remember specifically the answer you made to the last question that it asked. Everything else is irrelevant. That is not to say that Brainage is a bad program or that it doesn't give your mental abilities a bit of a boost. But I do think that it falls short of actually improving your thinking abilities or turning back the ravages of time on your cerebellum. But hey, it's got 60 Sudoku puzzles. That's gotta be worth something.

I'll see you next week. Don't let me forget.