Ryuta-Kawashima
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Dr. Kawashima trains brains on Kinect with Namco's 'Respond With Your Body: New Brain Training'
Just when you thought you couldn't train your brain any more, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima – the Tokyo University-based professor who turned "brain training" into a video game hit with Nintendo's Brain Age series – is bringing his particular brand of supposed self-improvement to Microsoft's Kinect this November. Instead of using the DS stylus, Karada de Kotareu Atarashii Nou-tore (or "Respond With Your Body: New Brain Training," as translated by Andriasang) tasks one to four players with moving their body to solve problems. For example: Align your arms, analog clock-style, to match a digital time. Your performance will be used to assign an age to your brain (sound familiar?). You can see some examples in the Japanese trailer embedded below; pay attention or you'll miss the Pac-Man-themed challenge right around the one-minute mark. The game was announced today in Japan as a November 20th Japanese launch title for Kinect, and will retail for ¥6,279. No word yet on a US release, but with the Tokyo Game Show next week, we expect to learn more.
Scientists scold celebrities for promoting Brain Age
Charitable organization Sense About Science has published its report on celebrities endorsing "scientific mumbo jumbo" that is of debatable merit. While diet pills and skin care lotions are obvious targets, the report (PDF file) also criticized Nicole Kidman and Patrick Stewart, among others, for endorsing Brain Age 2 (also known as More Brain Training in Europe).Kidman, who also did a commercial for the game, was quoted as saying, "I've quickly found that training my brain is a great way to keep my mind feeling young." Not so, according to Dr. Jason Braithwaite, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham. Said Braithwaite, "While practice at any task should lead to some form of improvement for that specific task, it is not clear that this improvement reflects anything other than a basic learned process for that specific task."The Brain Training games have been developed by Ryuta Kawashima, a neuroscientist and professor at Tohoku University in Japan. So which neuroscientist should we trust? That is, of course, debatable, but we'd wager that pushing yourself to do quick math calculations is a fairly healthy recreation. Not seen: a floating, polygonal head of Dr. Braithwaite.[Update: video fixed]
