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Brain Training Sharpens Driving Skills
In this second part of the driving blog, we’ll turn our focus towards how brain training sharpens our driving skills.
As briefly touched upon in last week’s blog, the naturally occurring process of brain plasticity forms the basis of the Posit Science BrainHQ training exercises. The primary objective of the program is to recalibrate the brain’s remarkably adaptive nature from the root-level up, so that it can measurably enhance all aspects of our everyday lives.
At its most basic level, our overall mental sharpness begins with our senses. After all, if we don’t first register and record information with detailed accuracy, how can we hope to accurately process it when our brain is called upon to react with split second precision to avoid a potentially fatal road hazard? The BrainHQ Driving Cognitive program targets these naturally occurring age-related and / or health-impaired cognitive functions by challenging us to sharpen our basic sensory skills. In real-world driving use, this translates into improved peripheral vision, faster recognition of moving objects and most importantly, quicker reaction speeds.
As part of the memory shaping process, the brain is constantly analyzing information that it receives from our eyes, ears and other sensory geared organs. Confusion and errors set in when due to the natural effects of human aging, recorded information is unclear and fuzzy resulting in a lack of sufficient detail for accurate decision making.
Addressing this fundamental challenge of the brain’s gradual decline in cognitive skills, the BrainHQ exercises by Posit Science have been designed to increase the quality and quantity of the sensory information that the brain is able to precisely register, process and record.
The BrainHQ Driving Cognitive Training program addresses two critically important sensory function areas with the Target Tracker and Double Decision brain training exercises.
Target Tracker (Multiple Object Tracking)
The purpose of this exercise is to improve your ability to simultaneously keep track of multiple moving objects. In real life driving, this skill sharpens your awareness and focus on the traffic around you, as well as on cyclists, pedestrians and other potential dangers. It only follows that to avoid an accident one needs to keep track not only of where potential obstacles are and but also where they are headed.- Double Decision (Useful Field of View)
This exercise serves to improve your useful field of view or said in another way, how much of a scene you can absorb with one quick glance. With practice this brain training exercise will increase your speed in processing visual data. As part of this exercise, you’ll spot a target in the middle of the screen, while simultaneously watching for a target that flashes for just a few milliseconds on the peripheral edges of the screen. In everyday driving, there are countless situations in which this skill is critical to avoiding an accident.
Whether you’re interested in the general BrainHQ program or more specifically the BrainHQ Driving Cognitive Training program, there are specific factors that should be considered as they all have a significant impact on our sensory awareness. Please click on the respective links to learn more:
For the most part, we don’t really pay that close attention to these six core factors when their vibrancy first starts to fade. This is because we often fill in the blanks of what we miss by applying context from our considerable life experience. So while this compensatory behaviour can help us make sense of the world in the initial stages, over the years the growing gaps simply become too large for context to fill in the void of information. This is where the scientifically-based, BrainHQ Driving Cognitive Training can help make that critical difference that keeps us safely on track as we go about our daily routine.
Our upcoming blog will focus on what the science says about the validity of the BrainHQ Driving Cognitive program.
DynamicBrain Inc. is the Canadian Partner of Posit Science Corporation providing brain fitness program, BrainHQ in English and French.
