I'm going to consolidate my personal stuff into main points of interest. Reading over my last post was putting me asleep.
Today was was much slower at work and I was able to finish many things that I had to put on the back burner yesterday. My wife and I had to eat a quick dinner in order to make it to church tonight. It's All Saints Day, which is a holy day of obligation for us Catholics. We walked out of the church into a blizzard. It was a slow drive home. We decided to watch the tail end of Chopped when we got home and just relax for the rest of the evening.
Today's to-do list doesn't have much on it since we went to mass.
Clean up after dinnerBlog
In my travels, I have searched for many different ways to improve or train my attentiveness and, in doing so, came across an exercise called Dual N Back. This is an exercise that uses visual and audio stimuli to test and train your working memory. I believe that working memory in ADHD sufferers is a key stumbling block in information retention. Our brain take in too much and often lose certain information very quickly to make room for all of the other stimuli that is being processed. What Dual n Back does is present a nine-panel grid in which one of the nine panels will highlight every couple of seconds. This visual stimulus is accompanied by an audio sound, usually a letter of the alphabet. The user has to respond with one key for a visual stimulus that is the same that occurred N stimuli back, and a different key for audio. For instance, if you were at a '2-back" level and the stimuli occur in this configuration:
Center square, "T" sound
Top Right, "P" sound
Top Left, "T" sound
Top Right "K" sound
Top Left, "T" sound
The user should have responded by pressing the 'sound' key on the 3rd stimulus, signifying that the sound matched the sound from two stimuli back. Likewise, the user should respond with the 'position' key on the 4th stimulus, and both keys on the 5th stimulus.
Now, this may sound very complicated, and it takes some getting used too when using it, but you will see an increase in performance with repetition. It automatically adjusts the level if you perform better than %80 accuracy or lower than %50. I went from performing poorly on the 2-Back level, to staying above %60 on 5-back level. I try to do these exercises for at least 20 minutes at a time.
Here is the official website for Dual N Back http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
Here is another site with many different exercises http://cognitivefun.net/
Also, here is a link to the wikipedia article about Dual N Back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back
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