A question for Martin, Shaun, Will and anyone else who’s done the training for a while

Hey guys,

I’ve had a look around in the improvements section of the blog but I couldn’t really find any posts on the topic so i figured i’d just ask.

I was wondering how you feel the training has affected your day-to-day life and what improvements you’ve noticed. At the moment I’m feeling quite good in general. I would almost say that I feel more rational than usual, and I find it easier when I have problems to disassociate myself from my emotions and look at it more objectively.

Also, I am a musician, and I’m finding that the things that I’ve been working on in my practice have been coming together recently at a much faster rate than usual. It may just be that I’ve been working on these things for long enough now that they’re showing up anyway, but perhaps the working memory training helps conversion to long term memory as well?

Anyway, I’m just interested in your experiences. Personally, I’m not too fussed about what number I get on an IQ test, I’m interested in being as successful as possible, especially as I work in an industry that has a lot more people looking for work than there are jobs.

Regards,

Scott

Tags: ,

4 Responses to “A question for Martin, Shaun, Will and anyone else who’s done the training for a while”

  1. martin says:

    My apologies to Scott for not posting this sooner. I just noticed it waiting in my pending folder.

    A note on the “improvements” category. I realize now that it’s ambiguous. I had been using it to categorize entries that showed an improvement in n-back scores. But Scott’s interpretation is perhaps more intuitive.

    Various of us have posted our impressions of the positive effects of the training. These are scattered about, but a few are collected under the comments on this post: http://mindsparke.com/brain-training-blog/brain-exercises/working-memory-training-report-martin-session-112/

    From now on I think it would be good if I can categorize them under “improvements” or “benefits.”

    Interesting that you’re a musician., Scott Many people, myself included, have enjoyed great benefits for playing instruments and appreciating music. For me, worth the training all by itself.

    Martin

  2. martin says:

    Hello again Scott.

    I created a new category called “Training Benefits.” I then went back and found several entries that discussed training benefits, either in the body of the post or in the comments. I added these to the new category. So, if you go to the “Training Benefits” category, you will see these posts collected together. (You will need to open them to see the information in the comments.)

    Best wishes,
    Martin

  3. Scott says:

    Thanks a lot martin, I think it’s definitely worthwhile having a category for this discussion. It will give people who are looking at trying the program a place to see how it’s helped us..

  4. Shaun says:

    Hi there Scott:

    You asked about any benefits, in my daily life, that that training has provided for me. That’s is tough to say, because I feel very skeptical about any subjective sense of improvement. It’s like a frog in hot water: because its temperature changes so quickly, it never realizes the predicament until…

    But I can tell you about some of my achievements since starting the training.

    a) In an introductory JAVA course at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I scored an A+ final grade of about 96% or higher.

    b) I took an entrance exam for a High Tech Professional Course at BCIT. While the entrance grade was 70%, I earned a score of 100%.

    Other than those two “outcome measures” I don’t know what else to tell you. Biking regularly, practicing meditation, spending time with my wife, my parents, and my friends, spending time outdoors, reading non-fiction books, and other variegated and sundry activities has occupied my life for the most part since I began the BFPro training.

    One other “outcome measure” is the improvement in my working memory. I found BFPro when I was searching the Internet after taking the WAIS-III IQ test by a psychologist registered in BC. The results of the test said that my Arithmetic working memory was a relative strength (98th percentile), whereas my Digit Span working memory was a relative weakness (63rd percentile).

    While I don’t know the norms for the Digit Span subtest, I strongly suspect that training with BFPro has led to a increase in mine. Just a while back on the cognitivefun.net Web site, I did some digit span testing and reached a forward span of eleven!!! That’s my main reason for thinking that my span has indeed increased. But really who knows.

    How could I possibly know whether the BFPro has lead to any improvement in my life. I cannot because it’s so subjective. Unless I take another WAIS-III, which is very unlikely, then I probably won’t ever have any “objective” measure of whether BFPro helps. Truly I keep doing the training because I keep seeing n-back progress, because I enjoy, and because I have faith in its positive effect on my life, my IQ, my concentration, and other aspects of brain function.

    Warm regards,
    Shaun

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.