N-Back Brain Training

After reading the article below, I decided to see for myself how Eric would do with this type of training. The general idea behind N-back training is that the game targets "working" memory, and as result improves "fluid" intelligence, meaning "the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things."

Can You Make Yourself Smarter? »

By Dan Hurley,  The New York Times
Published: April 18, 2012

A new memory game has revived the tantalizing notion that people can work their way to a higher I.Q.


The free online version of N-back game linked in the story seemed to me as dull as tests that would be given by a school psychologist. So I decided to look for something that seemed more game-like. I found this very straight-forward 99¢ app for the iPad.

Memory Birds N-Back Game »

App Store

Memory Birds is a fun brain exercise. In Memory Birds players are given a sequence of birds to remember and then asked to recall a step in that sequence...

How to play this was obvious to Eric so no challenge there. I had him play it for a couple of rounds everyday for about 2-3 weeks. He didn’t complain about using the app, but wasn’t that excited either. It became just an exercise Eric did because he was asked to do it. And predictably Eric got better with practice. I stopped having him do it partly because I doubted he was getting that much out of it. But mainly because the game was kind of boring after a while. My guess is that playing concentration with a deck of cards would be equally effective and more fun. I should add that the same article also mentioned a prominent experiment in 2010 by a neuroscientist using a variety of brain training software with the following results:

“Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained,” he concluded in the journal Nature, “no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related.”