Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima

The second question is still puzzling us. but the first is a little bit easier to answer. Primarily, this massaging of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes should be played on a laptop, not on your super-charged gaming desktop. As it really isn't a game as such, you shouldn't break out your trusty poopsock, so treat it as a casual web game you'd play during the advert breaks in the Neighbours or Hollyoaks omnibuses. If there's any programme you need to keep your brain exercised for, it's those soaps.

There are 12 games for each lobe of the brain that is being tested. I'm no science bod, but it seems to me that it doesn't really test how clever you are, just how good you are at playing certain games, as you can clearly get better and learn how to play them through sheer repetition. Nevertheless, each one is fun in a "try to beat your score kind ot way, but as for the scientific and biological merit of the whole package, we can't really comment It's also a little too expensive for something you'll play for a couple of minutes at a time.

Still, if the science does in fact work, it is a useful little package of minigames. Just remember that it works best on a mobile platform. Playing it in front of a large LCD monitor doesn't seem right somehow. And we're still wondering how it could possibly need 2GB of RAM to work under Vista.