Brain Games

This morning (aka noon) I woke up from a dream where I was putting around in a gas powered easy chair, brewed a cup of joe, and sat down to experiment with a couple of programs.

The first was EyeQ. It was developed by a Japanese researcher for improving eyesight and reading skills. I went through the first training session and decided it's quite a good exercise regime. Besides exercising eye muscles it also speeds up text so that you don't have a chance to subvocalize ---which is one thing I'm trying to unlearn. I think all those years when I was younger learning phonetics has created these voices in my head when I read. I was asking Mew about this, he is one of the fastest readers I've ever seen, finishing a 1000 page Harry Potter book in an afternoon, and discovered he doesn't subvocalize. Don't know if it will work, but seems promising.

Next I fired up a program whose company has long been out of business called ThinkFast! This remarkable little application puts your brain through a variety of timed exercises that test/exercise thinking speed, short term visual memory and a host of other neat things. It gauges your progress over time. Well, I hadn't used it in about a year and found I had dropped about 6 levels. It's one of those programs with an attitude and asked me "What happened, are you on something?" LOL. So I decided to fold this back into my morning routine. At right around project #5 in my todo list is rewriting this little jewel to incorporate some of the latest findings in cognitive research and flesh it out into a true mental aerobics app ...and polish the interface.

I think the coolest thing about technology, is not its ability to replace human functions, but rather its abilities to help us train and extend our capabilities. I have a whole laundry list of tools I use for this, but a couple I'll mention here are:

• Mind Mapping. Essential for how I organize thoughts on complex topics. I've been using MindManager forever, it's cheap for students, but other free alternatives exist. You can, of course, do this on paper; what's cool about it is that it captures thoughts the way people (or, at least I) think, which is not in hierarchical outlines but radiantly :-)
  
• Evernote is a class of programs I've been fiddling with forever, which are ways of capturing notes on the computer. I've been experimenting with this app in particular for about a year now (it's free, btw) What I like about it is that it can capture a stream of ideas as you think them and you can tag them later with one or more categories to help organize them. You can also see notes that intersect on several categories, which helps refine your searches. Another cool feature is the ability to scroll through notes using a timebar, so you can see all the various things you were taking notes on during a particular period regardless of how they've been categorized. I like the fact that you can pull the categories onto the note itself also rather than "filing" the note under some folder.
  

I have lots more for future postings though. Maybe.