Can you beef up your brain with video games?

The results are in and the diagnosis is not good.

It seems I'm in possession of a brain that is underweight, lukewarm and aged well beyond its years. Furthermore, my grey matter is woefully inadequate to tasks that require it to solve problems steeped in logic and visual analysis.

The good news is, there's a potential cure for my feeble frontal lobe: video games.

In 2005, Nintendo struck gaming gold when it created "Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day" for the handheld Nintendo DS game machine. Based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, the game presented players with a variety of puzzles and quizzes that Kawashima claimed would stimulate blood flow to the brain's prefrontal cortex.

Pilates for the noggin
Among the mental calisthenics posed to players: timed math quizzes, a speed-counting exercise and a challenge to see how many four-letter words could be memorized and regurgitated in a matter of mere minutes. The game then assessed the player's "brain age" based on the speed and accuracy with which the tests were completed.

Youth, of course, won the day. The older your brain, the worse off you were. Kawashima's research, however, suggested that elderly brains were not condemned to remain so. He encouraged people to play "Brain Age" a little bit every day and to watch as their accuracy and response times improved and their brains grew ever younger and more agile.

And thus a craze was born.

Despite the fact that "Brain Age's" quizzes sound a lot like homework, it's become a massive hit, selling more than 7.7 million units worldwide and spawning an onslaught of imitators. In Japan, brain-training games are all the rage. And even here in the United States, we seem keen to get our collective flabby frontal lobes firmed up.

Witness: In recent weeks, three new brain training games have arrived on store shelves, each one promising to give us neural networks of steel. There's "Hot Brain" and "Practical Intelligence Quotient 2," both playable on Sony's handheld PSP. And then there's "Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree" for Nintendo's new Wii console.

Meanwhile, at the Casual Connect gaming conference Tuesday, RealNetworks announced it would launch "Mind Medley" — a collection of 16 brain-training exercises — later this summer. And next month Nintendo is scheduled to launch "Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day" here in the United States. (This sequel to the game that started it all already has sold 4.3 million units in Japan and Europe.)

Not so 'Hot Brain'
Of course, whether these games truly evaluate or improve upon the way our minds function is debatable. And after running my own mind through some of the latest tests, I'm highly motivated to question their accuracy.

"Hot Brain"  Midway's new PSP title — is an unrepentant "Brain Age" knock off. The schtick here: You're a volunteer at the Hot Brain Institute where you take part in quick, simple puzzles that increase the blood flow to your brain (sound familiar?) The more the blood flows, the higher the temperature of your lobes. So being a hothead is a good thing.

The zany and fictional Professor Warmer guides you through various activities that test your logic, memory, math, language and concentration skills. Voiced nicely by actor Fred Willard (from "Anchorman" and "Best in Show"), Warmer rates your noggin anywhere from an "Icy" 32 degrees to an "On Fire" 120 degrees all while tossing off jokes and jabs.

Among the tests designed to take my brain's temp: A musical memory exercise in which I was asked to remember a sequence of sounds and then repeat them back, and a concentration quiz in which I had to decide what figure would complete a specific shape. In both of these categories my initial scores showed me to be sporting a "Luke Warm" noodle chilling out at 60 degrees.

Good thing I've got some skills in the language department. Tasked with looking at various pictures and selecting the words that rhymed with them (what rhymes with clock: lark, sock, knife or quack?) my mad rhyming skills saved the day. At last, my brain was "On Fire!"

Alas, putting all my scores together, "Hot Brain" assessed my overall temperature at a very average 79 degrees. (Me? Average? Say it ain't so.)

Not that I'm bitter or anything, but as long as we're passing judgment it should be noted that, as far as games go, "Hot Brain" is pretty average itself.

Loading delays pop up too frequently and last too long and while the various quizzes are pretty fun, they're also pretty derivative. The math exercise in which you're asked to keep track of the number of people entering and exiting a boat is an obvious knock off of the "Brain Age" quiz that asks you to keep track of the people coming and going from a house.

Also, though the PSP delivers some excellent graphics with "Hot Brain," it's simply not as fun to play this type of game on this particular machine. The DS's touch screen and voice recognition capabilities are sorely missed here. I love the way "Brain Age" has you hand write your answers right there on the DS's screen, or simply tap the correct answer with the stylus.

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