How to improve your brain with a Mac

• Article 80 of 89
• MacFormat, October 2009

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For those who want to enhance their numerical skills, Sudoku are a great way to get thinking in the right way. There are many Sudoku programs out there, including Web Sudoku Deluxe (http://www.websudoku.com/deluxe.php), SudokuAdept (http://www.hexcat.com/sudokuadept/index.html), which comes with millions of Sudoku, and Xudoku (http://stephen.dsm.geek.nz/xudoku.html), which lets you create as well as solve Sudoku.

Both crosswords and Sudoku are, in their own way, “brain trainers”. Brain training is now a widely understood concept, with Nintendo’s Wii and Dr Ryuta Kawashima’s Nintendo DS “Brain Training Academy” games among the most widely used programs for those. Brain training involves practising certain aspects of cognition, such as memorisation, spatial analysis, identification of objects, arithmetic and verbal reasoning. By practising, you can improve your skills in these areas.

The Mac doesn’t have a great selection of brain training programs, although it does have the open source iMemory (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Games/iMemory.shtml) and Brain Workshop (http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/). But the iPhone, has an ever-increasing number, including MindDojo (http://dbelement.com/apps/minddojo), Brain Tuner (http://www.gengarstudios.com/) and Brain Exercise (http://www.morebrainexercise.com) from Dr Kawashima himself.

Armed with your new learning skills, you can now go out and fill your brain with knowledge. The best place to start is the good old encyclopaedia. All you need to access Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) is a web browser, although the Dictionary application in your Applications folder provides a nicer-looking way to view it. However, there are good things and bad things about Wikipedia: on the plus side of the equation, anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry; on the minus side, anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry. So you can find entries on an incredible variety of subjects in equally incredible depth, but also find really quite cursory entries on important subjects that can be filled with inaccuracies.

If you’re after absolute reliability and depth of knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/) should be your first call. You can either use this through your web browser (for a fee) or buy one of the many DVD editions available from the site. Unlike the old print version, which would set you back a few hundred quid as well as need most of the wall of a room, the DVD version is only £39.99 and has multimedia content as well.

But learning isn’t just about having access to information and reading it: it’s about remembering. Many educational resources on the Mac also come with facilities for testing what you’ve learned. Unsurprisingly, some of the best of these teaching tools are designed for people going to school and revising for exams. Both Encyclopaedia Britannia and Letts produce excellent tools (http://www.bluemooneducation.co.uk/acatalog/GCSEedu.html) for teaching, revising and motivating you to learn a range of GCSE subjects, from the sciences to English to Geography and History. For the advanced student, there’s Doris Kindersley’s (http://www.startupmedia.co.uk/PC%20Software/Education%20and%20Reference/) A-level teaching and revision software. At both GCSE and A-level, the programs are more of a supplement to learning than an entire course, so don’t think you’ll be able to pass an exam using just the software. But you’ll certainly end up knowing more by the time you’ve finished using them.

Learning an instrument has its own challenges, but the Mac’s there to help – provided you own an instrument, of course. GarageBand 09, part of iLife, comes with ‘Basic Lessons’, which teaches you the basics of finger placement and chords for piano and guitar. For those who already know the basics, GarageBand’s add-on ‘Artist Lessons’ (£3.95 each, available within GarageBand) gets the likes of Sting, Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan to take you through their songs and techniques.

Good alternatives which eventually go further than GarageBand are iPlayMusic (http://www.iplaymusic.com), which provides many resources, including a Mac program with videos and 26 songs to play along with. eMedia’s Piano and Keyboard Method (http://www.emediamusic.com/pkm.html) has 300 step-by-step lessons for learning the piano, while Practica Musica (http://www.ars-nova.com/aboutpm5/index.html) teaches the fundamentals of music theory and ear training.

Languages are the main area of adult-learning, however, and these have their own particular requirements. As well as grammar and potentially a new alphabet to learn, there’s inevitably the rote learning required to get the thousands of new words you’ll need crammed into your memory.

Flashcards have, since time immemorial, been the number one way to learn vocabulary, and the advent of new media has allowed them to become more than simple double-sided bits of paper: now they can include sound files so you know how words are supposed to be pronounced. If you want to fashion your own flashcards, iFlash (http://loopware.com/iflash/) is far and away the best flashcard software: not only can you create multimedia flashcards for learning at home, you can print them out to learn on the go or you can synchronise your card decks with the free iPhone application.

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