Of all the online brain gyms I’ve joined, the one I’ve been drawn back to over the years is “My Brain Trainer”  (www.mybraintrainer.com).  It has what I like to think of as the “Nautilus effect” –exercises that are quick and almost fun, rather like the difference between working out on Nautilus machines instead of doing endless repetitions with free weights.
    My Brain Trainer has dozens of online exercises to engage visual memory, working memory, short term memory, processing speed  and other domains.  Like a real gym you can move around at will—there’s no set order—and you can spend as much or as little time on any of the drills.  If you don’t do well on one, you can move on or you can repeat it.  And it’s always keeping score, telling you how you’re doing against yourself, against others in your age cohort, and against all the other gym members.  (Like a non-virtual gym, there’s a fee.)  The other day, for instance, I performed a few points below the mean on a test of visual memory.  Displeased with this result, I went through the exercise again.  This time I scored twenty points above my peers.  Bingo!  I was back in business.
    Say what?  
    Did my brain suddenly grow new synapses?  Did one go-round on the visual memory machine instantly build mental muscle?  Well, no.  A better explanation is on the second round, motivated by my low score, I really paid attention.  Which is to say that the first time I did the exercise some part of my mind was somewhere else; I wasn’t fully—as they say—“attending” to the matter at hand.   The simple rule of thumb is that you can’t remember something if you haven’t paid attention in the first place.  Is this obvious?  Not often enough to people who are worried about their memory.
    This cannot be stressed enough:  a lot of memory problems are actually attention problems.  This is as true for people with ADD as it is for people as they age (when the filtering capacity of the prefrontal cortex declines) as it is for people who lead busy, complicated lives.  But if you can make yourself pay attention, as I did, or if you can learn to pay attention—which is the premise of the brain training software developed by Dr. Michael Merzenich, which I’ll write about at another time--memory improves.  
    My visual memory is pretty good when I muster sufficient mental resources.  It’s pretty lousy when I don’t.  If the half hour I spent pressing the down arrow on my keyboard every time the light on the screen went from green to red, and pressing the right-hand arrow when a word flashed on the screen had been in the list of seven words shown a few minutes before, had any instant effect, it was to remind me to keep my head in the game.