Hi Bracha,
My husband and I love your column. As we get older, we were wondering if there are some apps or websites that we can use to prevent memory deterioration.
L. B.
Dear L. B.,
While it is true that sometimes elderly peoples’ memories weaken, stimulating the brain and working your brain muscles can help improve brain function for everyone.
Here are some apps that claim to help improve and sharpen memory.
Elevate Brain Training: This is a game app designed to improve different aspects of the brain such as focus, processing speed, math skills and memory. It bills itself as a daily workout for your brain.
The games are personalized, and they adjust with you, hence as you improve your performance, the games become more complex and challenging. Your performance is tracked as well.
Elevate offers a seven-day free trial, after which users have the option to use the free basic version or subscribe to a more sophisticated version.
Lumosity: Like Elevate Brain Training, Lumosity is a game app. Lumosity consists of science-based questions to jog your memory and exercise your problem-solving skills, attention span and a variety of other important skills like flexibility, speed and logic. Games must be completed within a set time.
Lumosity provides you with a personalized program. It also gives you training insights, such as your strengths, weaknesses and cognitive patterns, thus enabling you to make a connection between the results of the games and your daily life.
Lumosity is available in several languages and has a free trial, after which you can upgrade to the premium version.
CogniFit Brain Training: CogniFit uses digital training games, puzzles and brain tests to stimulate cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, executive function, reasoning, coordination and concentration. It creates a personalized track for you, and monitors your progress over a period of time.
You can play the games with friends or alone. The difficulty level is based on your abilities. The app has games for people ages seven and up.
Cognifit requires a monthly or yearly subscription.
Left vs. Right: Brain Games: Left vs. Right works on adaptability, awareness, reasoning, reflex, patience and precision. It has over 50 games categorized into the aforementioned six categories.
The regular (aka free) version of the app allows you to play certain games in three out of the six categories per day. VIP members, on the other hand, have the ability to play all the games in any category. They can also see their score history, Category Brain Quotients and Category Percentiles. The VIP version is subscription-based.
Braingle: Braingle is a quiz app. It uses riddles, brain teasers and optical illusions to help you maintain sharpness of the brain and reasoning ability. It has 5,000 questions from six categories (General Knowledge, Books and Authors, Famous Personalities, Honors and Rewards, Inventions and World Geography). Each lesson has ten questions from the aforementioned categories. You move up levels as you correctly answer the questions.
Briangle costs $1.99.
Eidetic: Eidetic is a memory enhancement app that uses a ‘spaced repetition’ technique to help you remember important details or interesting facts. Eidetic differentiates itself from other memory apps by using information that has meaning to you. It notifies you when it is time to be tested on the information. There are three intensity levels (cram, normal and casual), depending on what you want the app to be used for.
Eidetic is free.
These are just some of the many apps available in the App Store and Google Play to help improve memory. Happy playing!