Interview with Brain Age Professor

Brain Age is an entertaining game for the Nintendo DS. The game helps you increase your mental capacity by training it with various games. Kotaku has had the chance to interview one of the professors of the game and ask them a bunch of questions that fans and skeptics had.

If there’s one reason to get a DS, it’s Brain Age. It was fun to see the presentation at the GDC and watch the host completely destroy Will Wright and a few other guests on stage. Brain Age could help you increase your mental functions and capacity. Below is a snippet of the interview, the first question asked and probably one of the most frequently pondered.

Q). How would you explain the concept of mental age to someone whoÂ’s never heard of it?

 

A). The mental age is calculated from expected average cognitive functions of specific age of people. For example, if you perform a cohort study of memory function of healthy people, you would find age-related decline of memory function due to normal aging. Also, you could calculate regression line between age and scores of memory function tests that enable you to calculate expected average memory function of specific age of subjects. Then when you refer that regression data, you could know your memory function, that is, your test score, is the same level as average people of some specific age. This is the mental age calculated from memory tests. We combined results of several cognitive tests to calculate the mental age in DS games.

Brain Age is an entertaining game for the Nintendo DS. The game helps you increase your mental capacity by training it with various games. Kotaku has had the chance to interview one of the professors of the game and ask them a bunch of questions that fans and skeptics had.

If there’s one reason to get a DS, it’s Brain Age. It was fun to see the presentation at the GDC and watch the host completely destroy Will Wright and a few other guests on stage. Brain Age could help you increase your mental functions and capacity. Below is a snippet of the interview, the first question asked and probably one of the most frequently pondered.

Q). How would you explain the concept of mental age to someone whoÂ’s never heard of it?

 

A). The mental age is calculated from expected average cognitive functions of specific age of people. For example, if you perform a cohort study of memory function of healthy people, you would find age-related decline of memory function due to normal aging. Also, you could calculate regression line between age and scores of memory function tests that enable you to calculate expected average memory function of specific age of subjects. Then when you refer that regression data, you could know your memory function, that is, your test score, is the same level as average people of some specific age. This is the mental age calculated from memory tests. We combined results of several cognitive tests to calculate the mental age in DS games.