Dreams, ADD, Dual N-Back Brain Training

I suffer from adult onset ADD symptoms, and looking for alternatives to drug solutions because they are not without a plethora of problems, I ran across an article on computerized brain training which related studies that have found a form of brain exercise called Jaeggi-Buschkuehl dual n-back task training to be beneficial as it improves working memory and many of the brain functions implicated in ADD.

Being anxious to find a better alternative to drugs, I searched for an online form of this training and found it (click on the link above to go there) in a flash implementation at a website called Cognitive Fun. There were a number of reasons I was looking for alternatives; the drugs aren't affective over the whole day, they make adjusting to variable sleep schedule extremely difficult, and they stimulants have potential health risks associated with them such as high blood pressure, increased rate of cognitive function loss with aging, etc, and for me another issue is that my brain tends to adjust to anything that attempts to alter it's chemistry rather rapidly and drugs become ineffective. The research indicated that dual N-Back training continued to provide increasing benefits the longer it was practiced.

I found there are side effects to this training. When I first started it was extremely exhausting. After half an hour of training I would become profoundly tired. I found it more manageable to break this up into two fifteen minute sessions and to follow each session with fifteen minutes of meditation that gives my brain some recovery time. Of coarse, real-life, business, kids, company, wife, all demanding attention don't make this always possible.

The second side effect, and the one that is particularly relevant to this blog is that it causes me to dream intensely, more intensely than anything else ever has. The dreams are vivid, long, complex, involved. They have not been, to date, the type of dreams that are predictive, but they do seem to make associations that upon waking, I often find useful, however, I also find them so intense as to at times be emotionally difficult, and that's not to say that they are nightmarish or frightening in the normal sense, but rather that their intensity is just so great that it is overwhelming. I also find these dreams often involve being someone else who is entirely different than myself which is something I haven't experienced in dreams until lately.

In healthy people dual N-back training still produces improvement in what is referred to as fluid intelligence, so even if you're completely healthy you might want to consider this. I am curious if others experience the same dream side effect. If you enjoy hallucinogens you might well enjoy the dream side effect if this also happens to you because the dreams very much have that quality to them.