Making a start on the BFP – Part 2
Planning and determination
“I have waited some time to start the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program. I have to plan the timing, taking into consideration the context of everyday life, and allowing for some unpredictability. I shall need about 8 weeks and one intensive hour each day for five days a week. I see it as an investment for my immediate future and as the BFP is certainly not inexpensive I want to make it work if I can.
No magic pill.
I know there’s no magic pill for the change in my capacities as I age. But a tune-up of the building blocks of receptive language and auditory memory at this stage in my life would be helpful. It is rather like when my 1984 Datsun had a new cylinder head in 2000 and has since had good regular servicing! It certainly runs much better despite the number of kilometres on the clock.
A proliferation of stuff
I have looked at most of the brain improvement stuff that’s available on the web. There is a proliferation of businesses, websites and products aimed at enhancing cognition and delaying the decline in aging.
Products are marketed aggressively, some seem more successful that others (the website http://sharpbrains.com is a market research company which gives a description of most of the software available and some good pointers about how to evaluate them). On some websites there are free games (with a monthly fee if you want to track your progress) that make claims to increase problem-solving ability by more than 41 percent in 18-20 days with just 30 minutes of daily training! That must come with a free magic pill!
However many people enjoy computer games and some companies are currently using Australian celebrities to heavily promote their software packages. Other products which use lists of word pairs to learn in order to improve memory are not attractive to me at all. Just boring.”
