Leopard Utility Lets Your Mac Tease Your Brain.

Exercise is good for you. Brain exercise is even better than good, it’s essential. Especially if you have a job or kids or both. I’m in that camp.

Brain Tease is a nifty Mac utility that helps you exercise your Brain by using your Mac. Did I mention that Brain Tease is free?

Granted, you have only one brain, but there’s more than one way to tease it. Microsoft has been teasing brains for years with Windows, right?

Mac users have the added advantage of handy utilities that not only let us become more prolific and efficient and productive human beings, but help our brains, too.

Brain Tease
Brain Tease is as simple as your brain needs to be assuming you need a little brain exercise. This handy utility comes in Brain Tease and Brain Tease II with the stated intent of helping you to practice your short-term memory skills, help you focus on details, and improve your concentration skills.

In other words, the Brain Tease exercises are good for your brain.

Guess what? They’re easy enough for school age children and the same exercises can help them to improve concentration, which, somehow or another might translate into better learning skills, and from that there’s a tiny, tiny chance for better grades. Or not.

Brain Tease is simple. You’re presented with a Mac window with a left and right side. The left side has nine squares, each filled with the name of a color—red, green, blue, and so on.

The right side is filled with nine blank squares. Below are a few buttons. Click the Start Normal button and read what you see on the screen as fast as you can. Then click on the Stop button when you’re done. Your reading time is displayed. Repeat to improve your time.

Then click on the Start Scrambled button, and read aloud what you see on the screen, and click the Stop button. Repeat adnauseum or until your score improves.

The right side of the screen starts off with blank squares. Click on the Start Memory Test button and the numbers 1- 9 will appear scrambled on screen for only one second. The idea is to click on the cells in the correct order, from one to nine. Supposedly, this improves your short-term memory skills, concentration, and focus.

I got a headache.

Brain Tease II
Brain Tease II is more difficult, and obviously meant for bigger brains, and even though the developer says it’s designed to help you have fun while exercising your brain, I know of other ways to have fun and not exercise my brain.

Select a difficulty level from Easy to Very Hard. The 77 second countdown clock begins and you’re presented with some math—addition, subtraction, some division, and so. And fields to enter answers. Correct answers get you points.

The more difficult the math, the more points, and the more difficult the level, the more points you get. I did pretty well once I started using my calculator.

You don’t get any points for a wrong answer, but after five wrong answers you get a headache, increased blood pressure, a higher heart rate, and an intense desire to sell your Mac on eBay. All of this comes at no cost. Brain Tease is free. It needs to be. Paying for a headache is just not right. After all, we get headaches at work but at least they pay us for the effort..

Oddly enough, there’s also a Windows XP version of Brain Tease, which somehow seems rather fitting. Hopefully, the Brain Tease developers sent a copy to Bill Gates.