You can download a free copy of this software here. It’s available for both PC and Mac.

The premise behind the game is really simple to understand, but difficult to master.

Basically, in each mode there is a grid with 9 different positions (think “tic tac toe”). A box appears in 1 of the 9 positions along with a letter (“L,” “T,” “R,” etc.).

In the default mode, your goal is to look 2 steps back and identify if there is a match. There are two types of different matches: “position match” and “audio match.” Each round of the game goes through 20 steps, and based on how many matches you correctly found the game will rate you between 0-100%.

Here’s a quick visual diagram of what it looks like when you find a match:

As you get better, the game becomes increasingly difficult by increasing the amount of steps you need to look back (such as 3 steps or 4 steps). More advanced modes also include other kinds of matches like “color match” and “image match.”

In each consecutive mode, you have to juggle with more and more information in order to be successful. The game keeps track of your progress over time and you’ll notice how much better you become at short-term memory and focus.

Here’s a video tutorial of “Brain Workshop” from one of the designers:

It’s usually recommended that you use Brain Workshop every day for about 20-25 minutes. I’ve only been using the program for a couple weeks, but I’ve already noticed my brain seems sharper and better at handling greater amounts of information at once.

Scientists at MIT were studying the brains of rats as they learned how to navigate through a maze. They found that during the first few trials there was a lot of activity in high-frequency brainwaves, including beta waves (between 13-30 cycles per second) and gamma waves (between 30-100 cycles per second).

Once the rats learned the maze, activity in these brainwaves decreased. This suggests that high frequency brainwaves are associated with learning and memory. And once the task was learned, future trials showed the rats were in a much more relaxed and low frequency brain state. This is because the brain no longer needed those high frequency brainwaves to help focus on the task. In other words, it has became second-nature.

Remember when you first learned how to tie your shoes and you really had to focus? Your brain was probably pumping out gamma waves to help you concentrate on the task as best as possible – until you got it. Now, however, you can probably tie your shoes without focusing at all, because the task is already committed to memory. This is how most new habits are learned.

This fits well with other research on brain waves. Beta waves and gamma waves have frequently been found to be associated with increased focus and concentration, a faculty of our minds that also aids in learning and retaining information.

Interestingly, for the past month and a half I’ve been using an audio program named Laser Focus, which uses a technology called brainwave entrainment. The goal of entrainment is to sync your mind up to certain brainwaves using binaural beats.

A binaural beat is when you play one frequency in one ear and another frequency in another ear. The difference between the two frequencies is the frequency your mind syncs with.

For example, playing 300Hz in your right ear and 340Hz in your left ear will produce brainwaves at 40Hz (the beginning of gamma waves).

The “Laser Focus” audio is designed to produce high frequency brainwaves in the gamma and beta range. I listen to it every other day for about an hour, usually while reading or writing.

I’ve personally found it helpful for increasing my energy, focus, and concentration throughout the day. Anyone who knows me usually knows I’m pretty sluggish and lazy. But now I’m learning more and getting more done. And since listening to it, I’ve even begun to wake up earlier and stay up later.

Now I’m not sure just how much of it can be attributed to the binaural beats, but I’ve definitely noticed a peak in my attention and productivity since I started it. If you want, you can try out a free sample here and see if it works for you.

I’m also interested in any other brainwave entrainment programs you guys may use. I’m always looking forward to trying new ones.

One of the most effective and scientifically supported techniques to help increase focus is the practice of mindfulness meditation. During mindfulness meditation, an individual tries to fix their attention on an object of focus; for example, their breathing. When their attention drifts off somewhere else (maybe to a sound outside, or the sensation of being hungry), mindfulness requires that we make note of that distraction and then return our focus to the object of our meditation.

(For more details on how to do such a meditation, a good starting point that I often recommend is the 100 Breaths Meditation).

The paradoxical thing about this practice is that mindfulness is not only our ability to remain attentive to our object of meditation, but also to be aware when our attention moves somewhere else. It is ultimately this mindfulness of our non-mindfulness (or mindlessness) that helps us cultivate a truly mindful practice.

Clinical psychologist Elisha Goldstein, who is a co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, recently wrote about this phenomenon on his blog at PsychCentral:

“There’s a very common misunderstanding in the practice of mindfulness that the practice is to stay focused on whatever we’re paying attention to and deviation from that is “bad” mindfulness. In my personal experience in session with a client or out of session in my own life, it is these moments that I wake up to recognize that I’ve been drifting that seem the most valuable to me. Why? It is this precise moment that I wake up to the fact that I have a choice to intentionally practice cultivating a sense of presence once again and this, in my mind, is the foundation to mindfulness and psychotherapy.”

From my experiences with mindfulness, I definitely agree with Dr. Goldstein. The benefits I have received from practicing mindfulness on a daily basis have just as much to do with maintaining focus as it does with knowing how to re-focus after I’ve already been distracted. The two concepts go hand-in-hand. The more you are aware of your distractions and mindlessness, the better you are at re-focusing on the present.

In my experience, it is unrealistic to expect oneself to hold extreme focus on the present moment during everything one does. Our attention spans, while certainly malleable, are limited. Our brains aren’t wired to do everything consciously, and there are times where our brains seem to take a mind of its own and go off thinking about whatever. It isn’t always bad, some distractions may even be good, because our minds bring something to consciousness that we may have been previously neglecting. Paying attention to where our minds “drift off” can often be insightful. So, in fact, there may be some sanity to our mindlessness.

(If you want to practice a meditation that allows the mind to drift wherever it may go, try learning about Objectless Meditation. Although I don’t recommend this as a beginner’s exercise in mindfulness).

I was recently reading the Satipatthana Sutta, a discourse in Theravada Buddhism that teaches students and practitioners how to be more mindful in their day-to-day activities. In it I discovered an interesting passage that I just had to share:

“When one is strongly mindful, one plants one’s consciousness deep in an object like a firm post well sunk in the ground, and withstands the tempestuous clamour of the extraneous by ‘a sublime ignoring of non-essentials.’ But this does not mean that in such a one interest is narrow and his outlook wrongly restricted. Strong mindfulness ignores the unnecessary, by adhering to the center of the business in hand, and extends its view to important peripheral conditions, with a widespreading watchfulness resembling that of the sentinel on a tower scanning the horizon ‘for the glint of armour.’ By such a balance between width and depth mindfulness steers clear of the extremes of lopsided vision and practice.”

It was the phrase “a sublime ignoring of non-essentials” that really struck a chord with me. To stay focused and intent on the activity at hand ultimately means to ignore everything that isn’t relevant to what you are doing in the present moment.

I imagine a baseball pitcher at an away game; the fans are booing and jeering very loudly. An unskilled player would easily get caught up in the madness. He would get nervous and start sweating more profusely, and he would let those external conditions affect his performance. But a skilled player knows how to sublimely ignore these conditions and focus merely on the task in front of him – get the next batter out. It wouldn’t matter to him whether there were 40,000 fans booing or 40,000 fans cheering, he is focused 100% on what he needs to accomplish in the present moment.

This example can be analogous for almost any productive activity. I’m sure you are already aware of many of the distractions that interrupt your work flow throughout the week. Imagine if you could become entranced only on the essentials of what it is you are trying to do, and if everything else just seemed to evaporate. That would be supreme focus.

I’m beginning to experience this in my own mindfulness practice. For the past week I have been doing morning walking meditations around town. I notice that the more focused I am in the movements and sensations of my walking, the less attention I have on the thoughts and feelings inside my head. It’s like a seesaw on a playground – because it is impossible for me to be more attentive of one thing without being less attentive of something else. It’s a constant give-and-take of awareness. And as I become more aware of this phenomena in myself, I can better identify degrees of mindfulness when I switch from one activity to another.

The more complicated the activity, the harder it is to cultivate a focus that “sublimely ignores” the non-essentials. That is why it is important to start building mindfulness in small activities, like breathing meditation, and then gradually extrapolate that awareness into more complicated activities* (walking, eating, cleaning, at work, etc.)

“Your personality consists of your character, which includes traits acquired through your experiences, and your temperament, which is traits arising from your biology. I think we have evolved four primary types of biological temperament, each associated with a range of traits. The personality type that I call the “Explorer” is primarily expressive of dopamine; what I call the “Director” is expressive of testosterone, the “Builder” is expressive of serotonin, and the “Negotiator” is expressive of estrogen and oxytocin. All these temperament types are found in both men and women and in every culture and race.”

2. 95 Million Patients With Depression Remain Untreated

“75% of people with neurological, mental and substance abuse disorders remain untreated worldwide, according to estimates by WHO (World Health Organization). This includes almost 95 million people with depression and over 25 million with epilepsy. WHO hopes that its simplified new treatment guidelines, called The Intervention Guide may help promote better management of depression, substance abuse disorders, epilepsy, well as a number of mental disorders in a general practice setting.”

3. How Meditation Reshapes Your Brain

“Richard Davidson is one of the foremost researchers of meditation’s effects on the brain. A Harvard Ph.D graduate and a friend of the Dalai Lama, he was chided early in his career for wanting to study something as unscientific as meditation. But in 2004 he became an overnight scientific celebrity for discovering that Buddhist monks exhibit vastly different brainwaves during meditation than normal people. Brainwaves are produced as the billions of neurons in our brains transmit action potentials down their axons to the synapses where they trigger the release of neurotransmitters. These action potentials are essentially electrical charges that are passed from neuron to neuron. By placing sensors on the scalp, researchers can detect not the individual firings of neurons—they are far too small and numerous to differentiate—but the sum total of this electrical activity, dubbed brainwaves for their cyclical nature.”

4. Do Financial Decisions Get Better With Age?

“According to the study ‘The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over the Life-Cycle with Implications for Regulation’, the average person’s peak financial decision making age is around 53 years old. The authors of this study surveyed the life-cycle patterns of financial mistakes using a database that measures ten different types of credit behavior. The financial mistakes noted included suboptimal use of credit card balance transfer offers, misestimating the value of one’s house, and excess interest rates and fee payments. The study found that middle-aged adults make fewer financial mistakes than younger and older adults.

According to the study, our ability to make sound financial decisions increases sharply in our 20s and 30s, levels off and peaks in our 50s, then begins to fall sharply in our 70s and 80s – the so called “inverted U”. The learning curve associated with gaining financial knowledge is believed to be the reason for the rise in our early years, while declining cognitive function is believed to be the reason for the drop in our later years.”

5. Train your brain to focus on positive experiences.

“The clas­sic line in neural psy­chol­ogy is, ‘As neu­rons fire together they wire together.’ The seem­ingly imma­te­r­ial and ephemeral flow of the thoughts and feel­ings through your mind leaves behind traces in your brain. So the take­away point is to be very thought­ful about what you think about all day long. A lot of us think about crud all day long. We’re wor­ry­ing about this, we’re plan­ning that, we’re obsess­ing over some­thing bad that might hap­pen that hasn’t even hap­pened, what­ever. Or we’re think­ing about what a loser we are, how we just never get any­where in life, or peo­ple don’t love us, or we get mistreated—and there’s a place for that if it’s productive. But much of the time, we’re just run­ning those movies in the men­tal sim­u­la­tor. The prob­lem is, as we run those movies, they’re leav­ing behind traces of neural struc­ture that are neg­a­tivis­tic, depres­sive, pes­simistic, and very self-critical.”

6. What makes a group smart.

“Being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t necessarily mean your team is going to be the strongest. In a recent study, researchers found that having super-smart group members did not have a significant effect on how well the group did on brainstorming ideas, solving word games and math problems or completing small projects.

Instead, groups did better when they had members with higher levels of ‘social sensitivity’ – empathy, or ‘how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,’ said study author Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor at New York’s Union College. And the people likeliest to display such a trait were women. A group’s ‘collective intelligence,’ or its ability to do well on a broad range of tasks, often lined up with how many women were in the group. The best-performing groups also had members that cooperated well. Members of such groups let each other talk more often – individuals didn’t try to hog the conversation.”

7. Neurons Cast Votes To Guide Decision-Making

“We know that casting a ballot in the voting booth involves politics, values and personalities. But before you ever push the button for your candidate, your brain has already carried out an election of its own to make that action possible. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals that our brain accumulates evidence when faced with a choice and triggers an action once that evidence reaches a tipping point.

The researchers presented monkeys with a simple visual task of finding a target on a screen that also included distracting items. The researchers found that neurons processing visual information from the screen fed that information to the neurons responsible for movement. These movement neurons served as gatekeepers, suppressing action until the information they received from the visual neurons was sufficiently clear. When that occurred, the movement neurons then proceeded to trigger the chosen movement.”

8. Dangerous Idea #32: Implant Memory Chips In Our Brain

“‘There seem to be really important functions to forgetting,’ says Dr. Ellen McGee, a medical ethicist and retired Long Island University C.W. Post professor. While McGee focuses her research on the ethical implications of using any type of neural interfacing, she says it is unclear that a memory-enhancing device will be good for humans…

‘We have memories that cause us trauma,’ says McGee, ‘We have memories that make us guilty. We have memories that if we were flooded with them, might keep us from being able to act in the present, and to enjoy the present. So, it’s not clear how humans with ‘total recall’ would function.’”

9. The brain and creativity, an excerpt from the documentary documentary “My brilliant brain.”