Brain Games

Work that cortex.

This week I spent several hundred dollars on my brain, buying some university lab-crafted brain games. It seemed like a reasonable investment that I rationalized by admitting that more than once I've spent more destroying brain cells over a single weekend.

I figured it deserved a boost for a change.

It is not that I am losing my mind, quite yet, but I have always been kind of annoyed by my inability to remember certain things. Like people's names, for example. This holds true for people I met three minutes ago as much as it does for people I've known for quite some time. Even when I am looking right at them, I can fall into an internal panic thinking:

"What is this person's name?"

This is most awkward when your sister already thinks you don't like her third husband.

Alas, despite a career of meeting people, my brain is a sieve when it comes to names. Sure, go ahead and drop your name (and then listen carefully as it plops to the floor right there between us).

I should add that the investment was prompted by a book I recently read about the brain that essentially argues, "use it or lose it." A big chunk of the book was about brain rehab and getting back something that had been lost. So, I figured, based on the book's advice, maybe I could get something I never had through a workout of sorts.

Picture my skinny weakling brain in the "before" pictures.

I'm about to get mentally buff.

So the kit includes several games played on the computer which are meant to help keep everything in place up there. What exactly, is sometimes hard to determine. So, like working with a good trainer, I'm just doing everything I'm told.

Some of the games have instructions that I honestly cannot understand and cannot be bothered to read. Most of them I can figure out by diving in and playing, skipping the instructions page altogether.

This may be dangerous, like putting together IKEA furniture freestyle, but I already feel like I have a leftover screw loose, so I'm all in.

The first game I tried is your basic memory game. This is just what I need. It is a game most everyone played as a kid that includes a deck of cards with images on them all laid out on the table face down. Each card has a corresponding match and by flipping over cards the least number of times possible, you are to find each card's match. Each match gets you a point.

Sidebar: my favourite iteration of this game ever was played on Japanese TV when I lived in Tokyo. Surprisingly, it was a game show that ran around dinner time yet targeted the Japanese "salaryman" (who, ironically, would never be home at dinner time because of their working hours). Regardless, the twist was that rather than cards or some sort of digital game board, they used topless women.

The women would lie face down on the sound stage floor, not to reveal the numbers written across their chests until prompted to do so by the contestant.

And his big stick.

Once poked, a woman would roll over to reveal her number - and ample chest - and then lay there while the salaryman player would first contemplate and then poke at another woman to hopefully find her match.

And so on.

Of course, the men would be terribly bad at remembering, requiring numerous pokes and reveals throughout the half-hour show.

Soft porn, or memory game? You decide.

The Japanese are renowned for long, healthy lives and mental acuity. Who am I to judge how they do it?

The second game I embarked upon is called Farmer's Challenge and is supposed to help improve my working memory. The game gives you increasingly longer lists of items to remember, all themed around a farm. After my first round I would have renamed it "Annoying Recipe Game."

It starts out easy enough, but as you get to higher levels, the sentences for what you are to add to your mental list get longer. When you are in the thick of it, it starts to resemble trying to both remember items as well as what to do with them while watching a cooking video.

With no pause or rewind.

"This is good for me," I say, between other, more colourful, words.

After the stupid recipe game, I found a game that I'm not exactly sure what it is developing. It works by showing you an image on the screen while saying a word. When the word and the image match (for example, you see a chicken and hear the word chicken) you click the space bar.

When it doesn't match, you do nothing.

Again, it starts off easy enough, but speeds up eventually to the point where you need the reflexes of an Air Force pilot in combat. It kind of feels like that too. Images and words are flashing at you and you KNOW that's not a chicken, but don't want to get it wrong so you start to sweat and then inevitably mispress which causes the annoying bleep sound. Before you know it you are yelling at your brain game and saying things like: "Now! I'm ready! Go! Give it to me!"

You want to be that Top Gun pilot.

You want to win the dogfight.

But you can't seem to not screw up.

That was definitely not a chicken.

While this is the most stressful of the games, there is nothing actually at stake within the game, which I do appreciate. I would not be surprised, however, if at higher levels they introduced a plane full of passengers that you are now flying with only one wing and you need to land safely next to a kitten sanctuary.

Depending on what my work day was like, I may or may not play this game much.

The suggestion is that you play for 15 minutes a day.

If you remember.

I guess the "play" itself is a youthful experience. And because I really have to focus, other than playing "combat pilot," the experience is quite pleasant. You can't play if you are thinking about other stuff, so in a way it's a little escape. I suppose only time will tell if it has any effect on my memory though.

So far, I don't feel any different.

I will let you know after next Thanksgiving when I have to sit across from whatsisname.