Session number: 1

Average n-back: 2.2

Duration (min.): 30

Hey. I hope it’s okay that I post a question here. Also, sorry for the fairly long post, but I’m trying to explain something which is pretty abstract, even a bit vague maybe, and it’s difficult to describe it in fewer words.

I have a question that could perhaps be called ‘methodological’. I just bought the program and did my first training session (at the end of which I went from n=2 to n=3). In this first session, I noticed that I instinctively can think of two different ways to go about doing the exercise:

Approach #1: Let’s call it the ‘intuitive’ approach. While doing the exercise, I don’t think how I am solving it. I just *somehow* store as much of the information as I can, and recall it as good as I can. It’s a bit like I’m letting my mind focus on the problem, without trying to grasp *how* I’m actually doing it. You could also say it’s sort of “formless”… my mind just works on it, without me being able to put into words the exact representation of the problem and the algorithm going on in my mind while I solve it.

Approach #2: Let’s call it the ‘explicitly visualized mental representation’ approach. I very precisely visualize and conceptualize what I am doing, *while* I’m doing the training. Basically, I imagine a
sort of stack on which I put the items. In the case of the small stack I need so far (n=2 or 3), it’s easy to imagine this. The leftmost item on the stack is the oldest, the rightmost the newest item. Whenever a new item appears, I compare it to the relevant one on the stack, then push the oldest item out of the stack, and all the other items move one to the left. The ‘visual’ items are a back square with white circle that marks the position at that time, the ‘audio’ items are little letters I put on the stack, i.e. in both cases, I store mental pictures.

Here’s how I performed with those two methods in my first session: I got the overall best results with approach #1 (the intuitive one), around 11 hits if I concentrated, but I’m not sure if approach #2 would be better in the long run.

With approach #2 I did a few runs where I did the visual and audio problems separately (i.e. only concentrating on visual items, or only on the audio), and doing so I easily got perfect recall in those cases (well, obviously “perfect” as in 6 out of 12 hits, since I only aimed at doing half of the exercise). I wasn’t able to do both audio and visual side together with approach #2 yet, i.e. I couldn’t visualize 2 stacks (or 2 different types of items on one stack), but I’m kind of sure I could train myself to be able to do so.

Okay, so here’s my question: How should I proceed? Should I continue for the rest of the training with the ‘intuitive’ method (which seems to give overall better results, and which is easier and more intuitive in a way), or should I try to use the ‘explicitly visualized mental representation’ method? The latter seems to have a bit of an ‘overhead’, i.e. I lose some time/brain computing cycles visualizing that stack, but then again, I know from experience that sometimes an approach that seems cumbersome at first is actually more efficient in the long run.

Brain Fitness Pro working-memory training report.

This post was submitted by minvogt.