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American Mensa has been holding its “Mind Games” competition each year since 1990 to select five new games from a group of about 50 or 60 submitted by manufacturers. Those five winners earn the right to display the Mensa Select Seal.

The games are selected by a group of Mensans who love to play board games. They spend a whole weekend learning, playing and evaluating the games submitted, ranking their favorites by the end of the weekend. Each participant has 30 games assigned to them to rate and vote on. They are also able to play any of the other games if they so choose.

Mind Games is a crazy-fun weekend of nothing but game playing with people who truly love board games. I just got back Sunday night from attending this year’s Mind Games in San Diego, California. Yes, I’m sleep deprived. Yes, I had a great time. Yes, I plan on buying a bunch of new games. Yes, I want to go every year, but no, I can’t afford it. Next year’s Mind Games competition will be held in Albany, New York.

Past winners of the Mensa Select Seal include the familiar (Taboo, Scattergories, Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition, Set, Magic: The Gathering, Rush Hour, Apples to Apples, Fluxx, Blokus, TransAmerica, 10 Days in Africa) and the less familiar (Traverse, Quiddler, Metro, Curses!, The Legend of Landlock, Tiki Topple).

While there were plenty of so-so games at the competition, the ones that won this year were solid choices. Without further ado, here are this year’s Mensa Select winners, in no particular order.

Image: Out of the Box Games

Word on the Street by Out of the Box Games
After playing Word on the Street, I knew it would be one of the winners. It’s a fun group game, but it also requires you to think. To play, make two teams. On each team’s turn, they are assigned a category and need to quickly come up with a word fitting that category that uses as many letters that are still on the board as possible. Those letters are then pulled closer to their side of the board, or off the edge. The first team that gets at least eight tiles of their side of the board wins.

Image: MindWare

Dizios by MindWare
I also knew Dizios would do well, since it’s great for families and has a simple concept. The idea is to match up the colors along the edges of the swirly colored tiles and gain as many points as possible by building on tiles that have as many dots as possible on them. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Image: Wiggles 3D

Yikerz! by Wiggles 3D
This game comes complete with its own sound effects! You place special magnets on triangular pieces of mouse-pad-like material, trying to stay out of the magnetic field of the other magnets. The object is to get rid of all of your magnets first, but beware! If you cause magnets to stick together, or if you push any off the edge, you have to pick those up. The noise the magnets make when they click together adds to the fun!

Image: Anomia Press

Anomia by Anomia Press
This seemingly simple card game will make you laugh and drive you crazy. You’ll also find yourself saying, “Uh..” a lot. It’s a fast paced game of pattern matching and thinking of words that fit categories. Fun for many ages and group sizes.

Image: Gamewright

Forbidden Island by Gamewright
This cooperative game was often compared to Pandemic at Mind Games. It wasn’t on my voting sheet and I regret not making time to play it. Here is the game’s description from Gamewright’s website:

Dare to discover Forbidden Island! Join a team of fearless adventurers on a do-or-die mission to capture four sacred treasures from the ruins of this perilous paradise. Your team will have to work together and make some pulse-pounding maneuvers, as the island will sink beneath every step! Race to collect the treasures and make a triumphant escape before you are swallowed into the watery abyss!

I was pleasantly surprised with Yikerz! and Anomia winning, though. Those were two games that I really enjoyed, but they seemed like underdogs. I’m pleased that other people enjoyed them as much as I did!

Regardless of which games win, all games played at Mind Games receive very helpful and often detailed feedback from the game-playing folk. This can help improve the game for future editions or give ideas for future games. Several of the games submitted contain wonderful pieces and materials, but the directions are lacking. Helpful suggestions from Mind Games participants can result in a new version of the rules and a very successful game.

Though it wasn’t a winner, the game I managed to snag at the end-of-event game giveaway was Zenith, a fun, family-friendly strategy game from MindWare. Some other games that I really enjoyed but that didn’t win include Simpatico, Fish Stix, AnimaLogic, Letter Roll, Q-bitz, 7 Ate 9 and Rory’s Story Cubes.

Note to Game Publishers: You can’t earn the Mensa Select Seal if you don’t submit games. Please consider submitting. Even if you don’t win, you still get invaluable feedback from people who know and love games, and hundreds of game playing folk will know about your game. Some will buy it when they get home. Some will take a copy home with them. It’s a great marketing opportunity!

Read More http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/04/2010-mensa-select-games/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#ixzz0liY8aoFD

Brain games don’t make you smarter: UK survey

By Maria Cheng on 21 April 2010

People playing computer games to train their brains might as well be playing Super Mario, new research suggests.

In a six-week study, experts found people who played online games designed to improve their cognitive skills didn’t get any smarter.

Can any game stimulate your intellect or memory? (Credit: Nintendo)

Researchers recruited participants from viewers of the BBC’s science show Bang Goes the Theory. More than 8600 people aged 18 to 60 were asked to play online brain games designed by the researchers to improve their memory, reasoning and other skills for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week.

They were compared to more than 2700 people who didn’t play any brain games, but spent a similar amount of time surfing the internet and answering general knowledge questions. All participants were given a sort of IQ test before and after the experiment.

Researchers said the people who did the brain training didn’t do any better on the test after six weeks than people who had simply been on the internet. On some sections of the test, the people who surfed the net scored higher than those playing the games.

The study was paid for by the BBC and published online Tuesday by the journal Nature.

“If you’re [playing these games] because they’re fun, that’s absolutely fine,” said Adrian Owen, assistant director of the Cognition and Brain Sciences unit at Britain’s Medical Research Council, the study’s lead author. “But if you’re expecting [these games] to improve your IQ, our data suggests this isn’t the case,” he said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

One maker of brain games said the BBC study did not apply to its products. Steve Aldrich, CEO of Posit Science, said the company’s games, some of which were funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health, have been proven to boost brain power.

“Their conclusion would be like saying, ‘I cannot run a mile in under four minutes and therefore it is impossible to do so,” Aldrich said.

Posit Science has published research in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing their games improved memory in older people.

Computer games available online and marketed by companies like Nintendo that supposedly enhance memory, reasoning and other cognitive skills are played by millions of people worldwide, though few studies have examined if the games work.

“There is precious little evidence to suggest the skills used in these games transfer to the real world,” said Art Kramer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois. He was not linked to the study and has no ties to any companies that make brain training games.

Kramer had several reservations about the BBC study’s methodology and said some brain games had small effects in improving people’s cognitive skills. “Learning is very specific,” he said. “Unless the component you are trained in actually exists in the real world, any transfer will be pretty minimal.”

Instead of playing brain games, Kramer said people would be better off getting some exercise. He said physical activity can spark new connections between neurons and produce new brain cells. “Fitness changes the building blocks of the brain’s structure,” he said.

Still, Kramer said some brain training games worked better than others. He said some games made by Posit Science had shown modest benefits, including improved memory in older people.

Other experts said brain games might be useful, but only if they weren’t fun.

“If you set the level for these games to a very high level where you don’t get the answers very often and it really annoys you, then it may be useful,” said Philip Adey, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at King’s College in London.

If people are enjoying the brain games, Adey said they probably aren’t being challenged and might as well be playing a regular video game.

He said people should consider learning a new language or sport if they really wanted to improve their brain power. “To stimulate the intellect, you need a real challenge,” Adey said, adding computer games were not an easy shortcut. “Getting smart is hard work.”

Let’s informally broaden the survey. Do you think any type of game can improve (or at least preserve) your brain power? Yes? No? Only for old folks? Discuss below.

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Discover your full potential

If you want to keep your brain working at its best just follow these easy tips. You will be boosting your ability to concentrate, remember and to learn. You will also help your brain to stay young.

The most important thing for your brain is proper nutrition. Start the day with a healthy breakfast. Your brain is made of 60% fat so foods like eggs, sardines and anything containing essential fatty acids are great for brain health. Your brain consumes 30% of the calories your body uses so it is important to eat regular meals.

You may like to consider Ginkgo Biloba and iron as supplements. Both of these help with oxygen supply to your brain.

Exercise is also essential for healthy brain function. Exercise helps increase the supply of oxygen available for your brain. It helps with the generation of new brain cells. Just thirty minutes of brisk walking three times a week will improve your brain.

In a recent study, scientists found that learning new skills increased brainpower. The cases they tested involved the subjects learning how to juggle. Learning new skills boosts your brain function.

Sleep is also essential to healthy brain function. REM sleep is important for healthy brain function and you need to get about seven to nine hours of sleep to benefit.

Your body needs exercise and so does your brain. To improve memory and concentration you should exercise your brain daily with mental exercises. Studies have shown that it is never too late to improve your brain. People in their seventies showed improved brain function after doing daily brain boosting exercises.

Sudoku, crosswords and similar puzzles are an excellent way to exercise your brain.

Listening to classical music has also been proven to increase brain activity. You can relax while you build your brainpower.

Wake up your brain cells whenever you get a moment by reading or writing poetry or nonsense verses.

Dream up puzzles or riddles. Use your imagination and invent silly tools for the home or office.

It doesn’t matter what you do,as long as you think outside the square. Give your imagination free rein and see what comes.

If you can’t make up your own, read works from others. Dr.Seuss is a classic example of an imagination let free.

Try creating riddles based on formulas found in riddle books.

Stimulate your brain cells and see how interesting life becomes.

Click Here To Go To The Review

Games for brainiacs are a good way to exercise your brain and they will keep you busy during the holiday break

• By Brandon Keim
• October 15, 2009  |
• 1:12 pm  |
• Categories: Brains and Behavior

A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.

Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.

“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

In a study published Thursday in Science, Sahin’s team studied a region known as Broca’s center, named for French anatomist Paul Pierre Broca who observed that two people with damage to a certain spot in the front of their brains had lost the ability to speak, but could still think.

Broca’s discovery was made in 1865, but subsequent research has been relatively incremental, reinforcing the language-central role of this area but saying little about what goes on inside it. Speech can’t be tested in any life form other than ourselves, and the standard tool for reading the human brain is fMRI, which averages the activity of millions of neurons at set intervals. It’s useful for highlighting regions of the brain that are involved in cognitive tasks, but can’t detail what’s happening inside those areas.

Sahin’s team benefited from a brain-reading technology called intra-cranial electrophysiology, or ICE, in which electrodes are positioned inside the brain itself. It’s a medical rather than a research tool, used to precisely measure electrical activity in the brains of epileptics who don’t respond to treatment. ICE lets doctors see exactly which parts of a patient’s brain may be surgically removed to prevent future seizures. Though it’s far too invasive and risky to ever be used for academic research, it gave Sahin’s team a chance to watch brains as they processed language.

The patients are “just sitting in a hospital bed, looking at a laptop, and they’re jacked in, with wires right into their brain. And we’re listening to the brain cells talking,” said Sahin. “It’s fantastic that we cold get so close to the actual neural data. Compared to fMRI, it’s like a close-up, high-speed camera where you can see each beat of a hummingbird’s wings, versus taking a picture of the bird flying around a flower.”

During the several days that three patients at Massachusetts General Hospital were medically wired, Sahin’s team asked them to repeat words verbatim, and translate them to past and present tense.

In the space of a quarter-second, a small part of Broca’s area — the only part read by the electrodes — received each word, put the word in a correct tense, and sent it to the brain’s speech centers.

This tested only one type of verbal cognition, cautioned Sahin, and the focus was unavoidably narrow, but it was enough to show that Broca’s area is involved not only in translating speech, but receiving it. That role was considered specific to part of the brain called Wernicke’s area.

More broadly, the findings may represent a general rule for Broca’s area, and perhaps other brain regions: Each part plays multiple roles, rather than performing a single task.

“It’s very distinct from a model where part A does job A. Instead it’s part A doing jobs A, B and C,” said Sahin.

In a commentary accompanying the findings, Max Planck Institute cognitive scientists Peter Hagoort and Willem Levelt said that since Broca’s original observations, “relatively little progress has been made in understanding the neural infrastructure that supports speech production.” The fine-grained Science data “suggests that we are witnessing the ‘first go’ process at work here,” they said.

In further ICE studies of patients, Sahin’s team will study other parts of the language process, as well as the role of Broca’s area in music and movement. In addition to illuminating the brain’s complex choreography, researchers hope the findings will eventually be applied to treating language disorders.

“I’m happy to contribute a piece to the puzzle,” said Sahin. “And the puzzle seems to get more complicated each time you put another piece into it.”

Image: Ned Sahin

See Also:

• Humans and Chimpanzees Share Roots of Language
• The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?
• Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions
• Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake

Citations: “Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area.” By Ned T. Sahin, Steven Pinker, Sydney S. Cash, Donald Schomer, Eric Halgren. Science, Vol. 326 No. 5951, October 16, 2009.

“The Speaking Brain.” By Peter Hagoort and Willem Levelt. Science, Vol. 326 No. 5951, October 16, 2009.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

The right side of Michelle Mack’s brain rewired itself to take over functions controlled by the left.

Born with only half a brain, Mack can speak normally, graduated from high school and has an uncanny knack for dates.

At 27, doctors determined that the right side of her brain had essentially rewired itself to make up for function that was likely lost during a pre-birth stroke. But her childhood and young adult years were fraught with frustration.

“It was very hard for me,” Mack said. “It was very hard for me growing up. No one knew the truth about my brain.”

Mack’s parents, Carol and Wally, realized shortly after her birth that something was wrong.

“There wasn’t a group to turn to,” said Carol Mack. “Michelle didn’t have cerebral palsy, I knew that. She didn’t have Down’s syndrome, I knew that. I had no place to turn.”

Ten years ago, Dr. Jordan Grafman, chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institutes of Health, finally diagnosed the problem. Watch how Mack’s brain healed itself »

An MRI scan revealed she was missing nearly all the left side of her brain. While it was clear Mack has some problems, Grafman said he and the family were shocked by the extent of the damage.

“We were surprised to see the extent of the lesion in her brain, which basically took away the left side of her brain,” said Grafman. “There’s some very deep structures remaining, but the surface of her brain, the cortex is 95 percent gone and some of the deeper structures, structures that control movement, are missing. These are all structures that are important for movement, behavior, cognition.”

The only answer, Grafman said, was that Mack’s brain has rewired itself. The remaining half took over some of the essential functions that are normally done by the left, such as speaking and reading. That rewiring, however, came at a cost.

“Michelle has fairly normal language abilities, certainly basic language abilities, she can construct a sentence, she can understand instructions, she can find words when she’s talking, but actually she has some trouble in some aspects of visual-spatial processing,” said Grafman.

“It’s quite possible that in her learning, in her development, when the right hemisphere either took over or developed some of the language abilities that it cost her in some of the skills that are normally mediated by the right side of the brain,” added Grafman.

In the 10 years since Grafman first diagnosed Mack, she has seen some intellectual functions improve, the doctor said. Recovery has not been perfect, however. Mack still struggles with abstract concepts and becomes easily lost in unfamiliar surroundings.

The diagnosis explained why Mack had experienced a lifetime of difficulty controlling her emotions.

“He’s helped us understand the reason why I tend to throw fits, temper tantrums,” she said. “It was because I was missing half my brain.”

Mack will always have some problems, but dad Wally Mack said that Grafman’s diagnosis and treatment answered a lot of questions and gave him hope.

“Dr. Grafman explained that the right hemisphere is taking over, and it might take her a little while longer to get there with all the rewiring that has to take place,” he said. “But that told us all these bad days are behind us and there are nothing but good days ahead.”

Michelle Mack is now 37 and lives with her mother and father. She works from home doing data entry for her church. She is fairly independent, pays rent and can do most household chores. She realizes she’ll need help for the rest of her life but wanted to tell her story to make it clear that she is not helpless.

“I wanted to do this so people like producers, photographers and security guards and police officers learn about people like me,” she said, “that I’m normal but have special needs, and that there are a lot people like me, so that they could be more understanding.”

The volunteers were taught to juggle with three balls

Complex tasks such as juggling produce significant changes to the structure of the brain, according to scientists at Oxford University.

In the journal, Nature Neuroscience, the scientists say they saw a 5% increase in white matter – the cabling network of the brain.

The people who took part in the study were trained for six weeks and had brain scans before and after.

Long term it could aid treatments for diseases like multiple sclerosis.

Diffusion MRI

The team from Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurology used a diffusion MRI which is able to measure the movement of water molecules in the tissues of the brain.

It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections Professor Cathy Price, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

The signal changes according to how many bundles of nerve fibres there are and how tightly packed they are.

Changes in grey matter, where the processing and computation in the brain happens, have been shown before, but enhancements in the white matter have not previously been demonstrated.

Three ball cascade

The scientists studied a group of 24 healthy young adults, none of whom could juggle.

They divided them into two groups.

One of the groups was given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and was asked to practice 30 minutes every day the other 12 continued as normal.

After training, the 12 jugglers could perform at least two continuous cycles of the classic three ball cascade.

The red area shows the part of the white matter of the brain that is enlarged by learning to juggle It is in the intraparietal sulcus at the back of the brain

Both groups were scanned using diffusion MRI before and after the training.

At the six week point, a 5% increase in white matter was shown in a rear section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus for the jugglers.

This area has been shown to contain nerves that react to us reaching and grasping for objects in our peripheral vision.

There was a great variation in the ability of the volunteers to juggle but all of them showed changes in white matter.

The Oxford team said this must be down to the time spent training and practising rather than the level of skill attained.

Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, said: “MRI is an indirect way to measure brain structure and so we cannot be sure exactly what is changing when these people learn.

“Future work should test whether these results reflect changes in the shape or number of nerve fibres, or growth of the insulating myelin sheath surrounding the fibres.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone should go out and start juggling to improve their brains.

“We chose juggling purely as a complex new skill for people to learn.”

Clinical Applications

Dr Johansen-Berg said there were clinical applications for this work but there were a long way off.

She said: “Knowing that pathways in the brain can be enhanced may be significant in the long run in coming up with new treatments for neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, where these pathways become degraded.”

Professor Cathy Price, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, said: “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections.

“This compliments other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects.”