If you’re spending a fair bit of downtime scrolling on the phone, as many of us tend to do, you might as well train your brain while you’re at it. You’ll find a variety of apps to help improve your memory, increase focus, challenge your mental skills and teach you new languages, to enhance overall brain function.
Sick of scrolling? Train your brain with apps instead.
1. Elevate
With a variety of games for cognitive skills and performance tracking, Elevate offers a personalised training program to help improve the skills you most want to work on. These include your processing speed, memory and comprehension. The games are designed with input from neuroscience experts and it’s available for iOS and Android.
2. Peak
You can test your current skills and challenge them to improve with Peak, which highlights mental agility, problem solving, focus and memory. In collaboration with scientists from Cambridge, Yale, UCL and King’s College London, innovative games are created to push you to improve and track your progression. Download it from the App Store or Google Play Store.
3. Mensa Brain Training
Developed by Mensa - the High IQ Society, along with puzzle experts, the Mensa Brain Training app aims to improve your concentration, memory, agility, perception and reason. The app is free, however, if you’re a subscriber you can check your personal Mensa Brain Index and see your global percentile for each category. You can download this one from the App Store.
Once you’ve worked on improving your brain, you can wind down with audio relaxation stories.
4. Memorado Brain Training App
With Memorado, you first set your training goals, do an assessment and then get a personalised training schedule with games matched to your goals and skills. Once you’ve worked on improving your brain, you can wind down with audio relaxation stories and meditative games as well. The app is available for free, for both Android and iOS.
An app offers a time-efficient way to learn a new language and improve brain function.
5. Duolingo
It’s long been known that learning new languages improves brain function - and it’s a pretty impressive skill to have too! Duolingo makes it easy, and time efficient, to get started. It features a variety of listening, speaking and translation lessons, with multiple choice challenges to test your progress. In terms of what languages you can study, the world is your proverbial oyster with everything from Italian to Japanese, Hebrew and Czech. You can download Duolingo for Android and iOS.