The mobile phone is often demonised for making us all a little less smart, but if used wisely it actually has the power to do just the opposite. Whilst scrolling mindlessly through social media channels, or watching endless videos of cats is unlikely to make us any smarter, using some specially designed apps just might.
Whether it’s exercising your brain through card games, learning a new language, new fangled brain training or any number of exciting possibilities, these apps really could help to sharpen you up.
Play Some Cards
Whatever happened to the days where people sat around playing cards? Playing cards help us to think more quickly, be a little more strategic and of course, it’s great fun to win. However, if you’re not fortunate enough to be surrounded by card playing fanatics then you can still get some of the same benefits through mobile phone apps.
PokerStars has its own app for Android that allows you to play poker with people from across the world; with its new Zoom feature if things are taking too long you can skip to the end of the turn. Being able to pause when you need to really think about your next move, but equally not having to suffer the wait if you’ve been dealt a poor hand, makes the whole poker experience a lot faster paced, and a great deal more fun for speed demons. Although it might not succeed at teaching you patience, it makes up for it by being both engaging and getting that grey matter working.
Learn the Lingo
It certainly doesn’t take a genius to realise that learning a language is bound to make you smarter, but there’s a lot of research that suggests it could be even more transformative than we might think. Truly bilingual individuals are able to switch from one language to another with relative ease. This skill trains the brain to be able to simultaneously hold more important thoughts, whilst disregarding irrelevant ones. This means that what was once just a tool for switching between languages can evolve into the ability to switch between tasks – even those that have nothing to do with language.
Of course, the main benefit of learning a new language is quite simply that you’ll have a whole new language at your disposal. Whether you’re planning a big holiday or want to widen your social or professional horizons, having a different language in your arsenal is invaluable.
Duolingo provides a great platform for total beginners to pick up a language and really run with it. They have a wide selection of interactive games, which introduce you to new vocabulary in much the same way as a child would learn. This feeling of learning through discovery helps the vocabulary to stay in your brain – and the games being fun means you’re a whole lot more likely to stick at it.
Good Old-Fashioned Brain Training
There are hundreds of brain training apps, and the simple reason is they work. Spending just 5 minutes a day on apps such as Moneyball or Lumosity can really ‘sharpen you up’.
Many will give you the opportunity to focus more specifically on the areas that you want to target. For example, you might have lightning fast reflexes, but be terrible at mental maths – the way our brains work is unique to the individual, so it’s important to be able to target our weaker areas.
The Elevate app is particularly good at catering to our individual needs. You begin with a test to determine where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and based on this test you are recommended exercises to complete each day. You can set the frequency of practices and the duration and the app will work out the rest.
Although this is a premium app, the results are tangible and delivered to you in easy to read graphs. Even more excitingly, you can track your scores and progress against other app users – sometimes a little healthy competition is just the kind of thing you need to really get you motivated.