Scott Ragin is an online tutor and experienced high school educator. Scott is always trying to create all the necessary conditions for the development of a well integrated personality in his students.
Cognitive sciences are doing their best to finally answer the question – how does the brain work? Although a significant theoretical progress has been made, theories can always be refuted by the cognitive sciences themselves due to the fact that there are several schools of thought regarding this subject.
However, Einstein claimed that whenever something works in practice, we do not really need to question the mechanism behind it, and that is certainly applicable on cognitive sciences. Here will be presented tools that can help you improve your cognitive skills. Whether they are supported theoretically or not is not important because they are all proven to be very successful.
First of all, let’s start with the most popular one. It existed on iOS only for a long time until Android version was made as well and it is a game very much adored by the users and they even confirm that certain aspects of their everyday lives have improved after they started using Luminosity. The game divides your cognitive skills to problem solving, processing speed, flexibility of thinking, attention and memory.
For each of these skills, you can choose the appropriate exercise and if you manage to do it every day for a couple of minutes, you will notice the increase of all your skills. The game is free for try but it requires you to buy it after a certain period of time.
The website BrainBashers is also made for people who adore playing games and it consists of many puzzles, illusions, logic puzzles, etc. It will have your attention for hours and you can visit it every day for a couple of minutes to have fun and at the same time improve your cognitive skills.
For example, one such game is called A Wolf, A Goat and A Cabbage. It requires you to think about transporting each of these to the other island but there are strict rules that you must follow and it may take you seconds or hours to solve it completely. The website is completely free.
XMind is a mind-mapping tool. Mind mapping is a systematic ordering of your thoughts on a certain subject. In other words, it is like brainstorming but you do not do it randomly and XMind can help you organize your thoughts flawlessly.
This means that XMind is not really a tool which will help you improve your cognitive skills immediately, but if you keep using it for every project that you work on, you will have all of your thoughts and ideas neatly organized not only in the computer but in your mind as well. XMind offers three plans –the free plan, the plus plan and the pro plan. The second costs $79 while the third costs $129 (currently only $99).
ReliefLink is something much different than the ordinary app for improving cognitive skills. ReliefLink prevents suicides. Generally speaking, this app is made by a famous psychiatrist and it improves your general mood and takes care of your mental health. There is a calendar where you can track your daily mood and you can find many other useful resources that will take care of your well-being. Furthermore, you can create a profile where you can input all the things important for mental health such as insurance coverage, medication intake contact info, etc. Finally, there is a map included in the app that keeps track of all the hospital and mental health facilities that can help you. The app exists currently only on iOS.
It is generally accepted that people who are good at Trivia quizzes are smart. If you want to practice your knowledge of trivia and at the same time improve your memory you can use a Twitter app called Twivia.
The rules of the game are really simple – all you have to do is to follow the Twitter account that asks the question and reply to them as soon as you can in order to win points. There is an active scoreboard that resets every Monday and there is a scoreboard of all-time best in playing Twivia. Therefore, if you like competing and learning, you should definitely try playing Twivia – but try not to google everything.
Visuwords lets you remember more words and train your brain to increase your vocabulary. Basically, it is just a simple dictionary, but what makes it special is the fact that the words are visualized into a network.
For example, if you type in the word music, you will have this network of words animated so that you can click on any related word and expand the network even more. The visual representation is very colorful and you have a legend next to the visualization that explains the nature of connection between words in the network.
Eidetic app is an app used for increasing memory and enhancing learning. It uses the spaced repetition learning technique which will help you in remembering all the little details that you usually do not remember such as phone numbers or trivia facts.
The app even makes a quiz out of the facts that you want to remember. For example, if you want to remember a string of numbers, you can input them and then have yourself quizzed. The application is also really fun to use and the users confirmed that the effect is certain and memory indeed increases a bit.
To sum up, we can train our brains to achieve better results just the way we train our muscles to grow stronger. If we, for example, focus on training memory and we are consistent, we will definitely be able to remember more things for a longer period of time. Luckily for us, there are tools and apps that can help us with that now. Some of them are listed in this article and if you are determined enough, you can try one of them and feel the difference.
Now that you have tools to help develop your cognitive skills, don’t forget Cite This For Me, the tool that helps you stay organized and ethical by helping you cite sources in MLA format, APA format, Harvard referencing, and additional styles!