Friday, January 4, 2008

The Great Brain Training

27. That’s how old my brain is, according to Dr. Ryuta Kawashima. That would be OK, except that I’m 26, and possessed of a graduate-level education. Frankly, I expected better of the ol’ gray matter. The “brain age” figure (as you may have encountered in your neurology textbook or some Popular Science article or other) is basically a measurement of mental flexibility, based on the fact that young peoples’ brains process information more quickly, retain it more easily, and generally perform faster and more efficiently than geezers’ brains.

So I’m doing math problems as fast as I can, counting how many people enter and leave a house, attempting to rapidly memorize a set of words and write them from memory, and dreading the appearance of the horrible Stroop Test, all in an attempt to pull off the mental equivalent of the splits.

All this is thanks to a little piece of software designed by Dr. Kawashima that I picked up a few weeks ago called “Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!” It runs on my Nintendo DS, and I’d heard about it before. It seemed like an interesting idea, so when I saw it at Yu Yuan market, I grabbed it. I mean, I grabbed it and paid for it. Don’t get the wrong idea.

Now Desiree and I (plus fellow teachers Paul and Brian) spend the titular minutes a day trying to whip our brains into shape. The holy grail here is a brain age of 20 (the lowest age the software measures), and so far 27 is my best attempt. Paul, young whippersnapper that he is, has managed a brain age of 24, but I hope to unseat him with diligent effort. Brian has proved to be frustratingly adept at fast mathematical calculations, and holds the top spot in almost every one of the training programs. He also has the distinction of being the only one of us to have a brain age lower than his real age (it helps that he’s older than we are). We’re also required to draw things like bulldogs, locomotives, and the Mona Lisa from memory (in order to “stimulate the prefrontal cortex” or some such foolishness), and Desiree’s marvelous artistic talents have stood her in good stead. I thought my rendition of a collie looked pretty good until the program compared it to hers, at which point it appeared to be a cross between a horse and a lizard.

All such competition, of course, is designed to push us to ever greater feats of mental gymnastics. So if you’re feeling a bit dull, pick one up! Me, I’ll just be struggling to keep the speed-reading crown away from that pest, Brian.

Dave

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