Brain Age, the Prefrontal Cortex, and Aspergians

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For Christmas, I bought my wife a Nintendo DS (it's lots of fun - I just ordered one for myself so we can play against each other), and one of the games I gave her was Brain Age 2. If you're not familiar with the game, it's a series of math and word puzzles designed to stimulate your brain. I've been giving it a try and... I'm terrible at it. Really, really awful.
Now all the puzzles are designed to stimulate the prefrontal cortex. Some theories of autism contain the idea that autism is in part caused by damage to the prefrontal cortex, our prefrontal cortex just doesn't work right. And all these puzzles, they're prefrontal cortex puzzles. And I can't do them. Heck, for half of them, I do so badly that I can't even get onto the bottom of the graph they provide to show progress, a month after I first tried the game. It's like someone took every logic puzzle I was ever terrible at, refined it, and put it into a game. Interestingly, these sorts of puzzles are also the kinds of puzzles young children in elementary school are often given. I was awful at them then, too - way behind the curve of my classmates (I only began to excell when we got older and moved away from such puzzles).

Has anyone else played Brain Age or its sequel? How did you find the puzzles? Did you find yourself similarly terrible at them, or were you able to do them well to begin with? I'm certainly improving, but it's slow, and frustrating, and often I can stare at a puzzle for what feels like ages and I can just feel my brain trying to comprehend how to do it and it just won't work. It's like there's a short-circuit there.
Does this tell us anything about whether autism is related to damage to the prefrontal cortex, or is it just a coincidence?

I have never played Brain Age 2 but I do own the original Brain Age and I don't have a serious problem with it. Most of it isn't "logic" puzzles... Most of them simply require you to look at the screen and make very quick observations. This is how the games "Low to High", "Head Count", "Number Cruncher" and "Connect Maze" work.

Other games, such as "Calculations", "Triangle Math", "Time Lapse" and "Syllable Count" require you to very quickly read the information on the screen and perform mental operations on that data.

Sudoku, however, requires a lot of logical thinking.

The Dawning of the Age of Brainius topic

At my age I welcome games and quizzes because I want to retain and enhance my logical, creative and semantic intelligence, and so I welcome such mental fitness workouts. However, I have just played a quick, downloaded version because of the cost of the complete programme.

I have read that this sort of exercise is quite the challenge. Good luck and here is hoping you will improve, mmaestro!

Some of them I'm terrible at - I.e. the time lapse one in the first, and the one where you have to work out what different voices are saying simultaneously in the second. Most of them I'm good at, though I definitely prefered the first. Calculations X 20 record of 14 seconds

I've not tried the original Brain Age, so I don't know how different those puzzles are. The observational ones I'm kind of OK at (but still bad), but others not so much. There's an anagram puzzle - I've never been able to do anagrams, and I usually clock in at about 4 and a half minutes to get through the game (the graph's worst score is 3 minutes). Ditto, there's a number memorization puzzle, you get 2 minutes to memorize 25 numbers and their position in a square, I rarely get more than 3. There's also a puzzle where you have to do simple math, and a number is scrubbed out as you complete the puzzle - you need to retain what the number was from the previous problem so you know what the next equation is. I forget half the time - I can do the math, but retaining the numbers when I can't see them seems next to impossible. Another game, you are given problems with the missing sign (add, subtract, divide, multiply) and have to write it in. I can do that pretty quickly, but to get a good score, you need to infer what the correct sign will be without actually doing the problem. There's not enough time to actually do the math, and while I can do the math quickly, when I try to infer what the right answer is, I draw a blank.
Does that sound like the puzzles are similar to the first version? Some observational stuff (tap the largest number from this field, for instance) is also in there, and I'm pretty good at it.

OK, where are the cameras! Only last night I went onto a site called lumosity.com! It has some nice games and, apparently, I do OK. I certainly don't do as well as I should though. Frankly, it appears that AS DOES adversly affect such things. Oh well, there is a bird game that is KIND of neat. It goes like this:

1. There is a box in the middle of the screen that has a letter flash for maybe a third of a second.
2. You hear a bird make a sound and it appears ANYWHERE on the screen for about a third of a second.
3. You have to move the mouse such that it is within 1.5 birds away from where the bird appeared.
4. If you fail, you have to try again. If you succeed, then you see dashes with those letters you got right, and get a chance to guess the name.

You are graded on speed and number of correct birds, and given extra credit for every guess based on complexity.

Frankly, I think I did WELL on THAT one! It is probably about the best that they have outside of the 2 away matching game.(Determine if the current shape was the same as the shape before the last shape) At least out of the ones I have seen so far.

I am horrible at Brain Age.

I haven't tried Brain Age, but I have Big Brain Academy (math, predicting, pattern identifying and memory). I've done considerably well with it but I plateau for a really long time. So far (if anyone knows the grading system) I"m at about 1600+kg, A-.

Speaking of coaching, I got My Spanish COach for DS and I have found glitches and mistakes, pronunciation mistakes. It also teaches basic conjugation and mostly vocabulary. It doesn't teach tense or mood at all. So, once I got to a certain level, I have an "open plan" where I just have to "master" the vocabulary words. My son likes it but I'm disappointed in it. I was going to get the English version, "My Vocabulary Coach".

We have brain age and flash focus and some other thinking games here. they are my moms. I find them easy to do so much that i am bored with it.

I did Brain Age and I'm actually pretty good at it.