Luminosity Brain Training: First Impressions

My initial bias about puzzles, crosswords, sudoku, chess, etc. is that they are a waste of time.  I believed that I could find equivalent and more productive problems to solve in my work of systems analysis, writing code, letters, email and persuading others to consider my ideas.  I wanted to find ways to improve my mind, not train my brain.

My brother invited me to join Luminosity as part of his family package.  Out of respect for my brother, I have played 38 games in the last two weeks.  It is an interesting process.  This “brain training” is different from "mind training.”  Many of the brain skills translate into working faster on my job in ways that I don’t get to routinely practice.  I have another bias, I don’t consider these brain skill very important, because I value accuracy more than speed, doing the right thing, vice doing things right.

I begin to recognize that my initial bias was that I placed all my value on “mind skills” -- building conceptual and memory models of reality — by doing problem analysis and troubleshooting, distinct from “brain skills” found in Luminosity.  This distinction between brain and mind skills is useful.  I am becoming clearer about the difference between brain and mind. I use the words "brain skills" to refer to matters of memory, external attention, reflexes, simple problem solving and "in the moment flexibility,” all the games of Luminosity.  Some of these words have use in the context of mind skills, but their meaning is different. For example the solving the problem of my initial bias against brain training is a mental process vice a brain process.  It wasn’t even a problem until I wrote this essay.  Increased self awareness of this  type cannot be developed except through processes of thinking, probing, pondering, experimenting.  Luminosity training is the kind of experimentation that provides the material to have this new self awareness of my initial bias against puzzles possible. Writing and thinking about my experience with Luminosity brain training in this blog reveals to me the nature of the bias.

I can see a potential opening to the possibility of translating my process of solving these problems from mental modeling to responding from silence.

I predict that there may be stages to my process of solving these problems.  

First, I start with either talking to myself, or mentally working out the solution via a mental model of images and comparisons to similar problems that I have solved in the past.

Second, responding by reflex,  no mental verbalization, and the imaging done so fast I barely perceive it.

Third, I begin to approach the experience of having instants of responding from silence, stillness, eternity. 

I work to do these exercises while remembering myself, i.e. maintaining the sensation of my entire body, toe to head.  Usually I become identified with some aspect of the experience and forget myself.  (Self-remembering in the Gurdjieffian sense, see “In Search of the Miraculous” chapter 7, paragraph beginning with “Not one of you has noticed the most important thing …”)

Note: I consider the mind to be the immaterial “form of forms” (Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer J. Adler) distinct from the physical organ of the brain/body. (Interesting discussion of this topic at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/ [The mind is] “none of the things existing in actuality before thinking” (De Anima iii 4, 429a24)