Coming soon, new 'special ops

Gamer IQ Gamebreak with 2 new games

2 new Gamer IQ games!

1. Space Escape - which is a difficult reaction time trainer (you need to steer the ship without colliding with the walls)
2. Space Air Hockey. Play Air Hockey on the long voyage to Mars or the nearest star. Break the monotony of endless 'shiptime.' Even though back on Earth people are aging faster than you are, you'll need diversions to exercise your brain.

Now we've got the solution.

XBOX Preview

I got an early test drive of the XBOX 360. I couldn't make any comments (I was locked up) until the product actually hit the shelves, which it has.

The graphical engine appears to deliver the top experience yet revealed on a set-top box type configuration. I played with a high def monitor and the quality was outstanding. Recommended upgrade to your collection of game boxes!

Gamer IQ Basics

The Gamer-IQ Dictionary goes into a basic discussion of the principles behind gamer-IQ:

1. Game players are faster than the rest of us when it comes to brain speed.
2. It is known that one can exercise certain aspects of concentration to improve.
3. With this improved concentration, what can one achieve?

The Hero sometimes has superior powers of concentration. In a modern fable, think of Luke Skywalker training with his lightsaber, a squire training with his quintain to learn the skills of a knight, a samurai learning the ways of bushido. In each case superior concentration leads to mastery of new skills. In the story Ender's Game, a young man learns to master a computer game that turns out to be in fact reality disguised as simulation.

Gaming therefore puts the mind into a state where it can be trained - whether by puzzles, strategms, or reaction-stimuli. What if we can monitor our ability and track it over time and apply it to real issues in cognitive health?

Science of Attention and Memory Loss

This is a fascinating study, showing that attention is critical to the early stages of impairment...complex reaction time, such as Cognitive Labs measures is one of the surest-known ways of measuring attentiveness and focus...

Here's more from the article which was in NeuroPsychologyPeople in early stages of Alzheimer's disease have greater difficulty shifting attention back and forth between competing sources of information, a finding that offers new support for theories that contend breakdowns in attention play an important role in the onset of the disease.

"Our results provide evidence that breakdowns in attention produce a clear change in the early stages of Alzheimer's-related dementia," said study co-author David A. Balota, a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Published in a recent issue of the journal Neuropsychology, the study suggests that subtle breakdowns in attention may offer a reliable clue that a patient is grappling with early symptoms of Alzheimer's-related dementia.

The findings are important because they offer clinicians and researchers another tool by which to better predict and understand dementia of the Alzheimer's type early in its history. Psychologists focus on early detection in part because current medications are useful only when given very early in the course of the disease.

While it's well known that memory skills deteriorate as Alzheimer's progresses, recent research by Balota and Duchek, among others, have championed the notion that breakdowns in attention may be at the heart of many cognitive problems linked to Alzheimer's. Although memory problems also show up in early stages of the disease, this study suggests that underlying declines in attention may be contributing to these memory mishaps and to other cognitive difficulties often associated with the disease.

"Because attention is prerequisite for memory, one might suspect that attention is one of the contributing culprits, at least early on in the disease," suggests study lead author Janet M. Duchek, an associate professor of psychology.

Participants for the study were drawn from volunteers at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University. Duchek and Balota studied 94 older participants, average age mid-70s, who were healthy control individuals or individuals diagnosed with very mild, or mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

In an effort to gauge each group's ability to effectively monitor and switch among competing channels of information, Duchek and Balota relied on a well-established psychological testing technique know as the dichotic listening task.

The Dichotomy

Developed in the 1950s, the dichotic listening test plays off the fact that humans are hardwired to process sensory information in a cross-lateral fashion - words heard in the left ear tend to be processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, and vice-versa. Since the left hemisphere of the brain is typically dominant for language processing, words presented in the right ear often have an advantage over words presented simultaneously in the left ear -- the right ear-left hemisphere processing channel is said to be "pre-potent" in that it has a default processing advantage over the left ear-right hemisphere channel.

Using the dichotic listening task, Duchek and Balota presented participants with distinct streams of audio information via headphones. One stream of information -- computer-generated speech naming three digits (such as 4, 3, 1) -- went to the left ear; a different stream (such as 9, 2, 5) went to the right ear.

By asking participants to recall numbers in the order they were presented to either ear, the researchers were able to measure an individual's ability to switch back and forth between right-left processing channels, and more importantly, to monitor how well attention skills allowed them to overcome the "pre-potent" tendency to favor information presented to the default right ear-left hemisphere language channel.

read more about the study

Starship Troopers in the Matrix?

Matrix IQ?

Here is one to try: Starship Eleven....http://cognitivelabs.com/gameriq_games_starship11.htm"

It follows in our effort of making available fun games that exercise the skills that are important.


What is the reality. Imagine working your way back through the mirror to find the architect, or is it just a projection of another architect? Here are the rudiments of a great cognitive-exercising game...stay tuned

New Feed locations

This is where to find the gamerIQ RSS feed:

http://cognitivelabs.com/gameriq/atom.xml

(It just changed!!!)

Also, the MemCheck Memory News feed has changed:

http://blog.cognitivelabs.com/atom.xml (please make a note of it)

Tell a friend contest

How many friends can you turn on to gamer-IQ? Just start here

Exercise/Amyloid Formation Prevention?

This piece of important data is going into the dictionary (registered members only), a talk with neuroscientist Sangram Sisodia at the University of Chicago...

..Studies have long shown that people who exercise are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's disease. Now, two recent studies of mice confirm biological changes in the brains of physically active animals.

"There's clearly an inverse relationship between the amount of exercise and the number of [plaque] deposits in the brain," says Sangram Sisodia, professor of neurosciences at the University of Chicago, who worked on one study. "Exercise changes the body's reaction to forming deposits; additional blood flow to the brain may help flush away the plaque."

This means that besides warding off heart disease and diabetes, exercise is part of preventing dementia. Although researchers do not yet know how effective exercise can be in this area, they have proved that increasing blood flow and heart rate is good for the entire central nervous system.

IQpoints

Friends and GamerIQ:

When you play a game it's easy to send a note to as many of your friends as you want-just drop their email addresses into the page at the bottom of the game, add your name and email address and you are all set.

Guess what?
You get IQpoints each time you invite a friend and they join. Get enough points and you can trade them in for prizes

5 Games at Gamer IQ

Sign up at Gamer-IQ
1. Asteroids - tests reaction time and flexibility
2. Battleship(s) - like the old favorite game
3. battle pong - quicker and more flexible than 'pong'
4. samurai warrior
5. mahjong - version of the favorite

Dictionary of terms ( science of gamer IQ )

Steps to Get Started

1. Login at the email prompt above
2. Answer a few questions
3. Start playing

Coming soon...a mental refresh exercise right at the start of your session!