By Brad Cook

“No pain, no gain,” your coach says. You’re back for another workout, but unlike the one that pushed your body to the limit earlier today, you seek to maximize your brain activity this time. Brain Challenge gives you a daily opportunity to do that, with 20 training exercises and six freeform creative games to choose from.

Create your profile, select a coach — Dr. Hurley or Professor Stevens — and launch your first Daily Brain Test. Five mini-games cover Brain Challenge’s main problem-solving areas — Logic, Math, Memory, Visual, and Focus — and evaluate your initial level of brain usage as a way to measure future growth. Your coach then lets you know which games you’ve unlocked, tells you the first rank you’ve achieved, and gives you encouragement for next time.

A Gym For Your Brain

Each time you launch Brain Challenge, you can take another Daily Brain Test or head into the Training Room and work on a specific area. Before each daily exam, your coach introduces a question, typically one involving a science subject, and gives you the answer at the end of the session. When your workout ends, your coach lets you know what percentage of your brain is in use now and details your total scores in all areas of the game.

Your coach also notes your strengths and weaknesses, giving you tips for working out in the Training Room, where you give your noggin a more robust challenge. While the Daily Brain Test offers varying difficulty levels, the Training Room lets you choose easy, medium, or hard activities, with 90 seconds for each one, rather than the 50-second limit used in the shorter daily sessions. It’s a good way to focus on a specific area and push yourself as hard as possible.

At the end of each Daily Brain Test, you unlock more games that are accessible in the Training Room. Over time, Brain Challenge keeps track of your historical scores, including overall play time, your daily progress in each area, which categories you tend to favor, and what percentage of questions you’ve answered correctly, as well as the percentage of answers that came faster or slower than expected. Your coach wants you to choose the right answers as fast as possible, so pay attention to your reaction times.

Post-Workout

You also unlock creative games during your daily workouts; they’re found in the Training Room. When you play them, you’re not restricted by time limits or the stress of coming up with the correct answer. You simply “cool down” from your brain-bending activities with freeform games that engage your mind in new ways.

We all know that mental fitness is just as important as physical improvement, so think of Brain Challenge as a “daily vitamin” that contains all the essentials for developing your mind. Remember the words of your coach: “Keep training to make your brain healthy.”

Brain-Stimulating Games

iTunes

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Brain Challenge gameplay area.

Memory Crunches. Try to figure out which tile vanished after the row dropped through the box.

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System Requirements

  • Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or Windows 2000
  • iPod nano (3rd and 4th generation only), iPod classic, or iPod (5th generation only). Not playable on your computer, other iPod models, iPod touch or iPhone. Please check which iPod model you have.
  • iTunes 7.5 or higher required to download (games cannot be played in iTunes)
 
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