Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Brain Age: 48

For years, every time a name or a word has failed to pop into my mom's head when she needed it, she would say, "This is so scary." She has long been afraid of Alzheimer's, but I don't think she has reason to be afraid: it's just the little things. When it happens to me (more and more often in the past few years), I find it more annoying than scary.

But a high school friend of my mom's has just been diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer's. His doctor, Mom reports, says we all need to learn/study four new things to keep our minds active and healthy. So after playing with Brain Age on my niece's Nintendo DS on Sunday, I went out and bought a pink one for Mom and a red one for me & Mike.

Our NDS came bundled with Brain Age 2, which informs me that my brain is older than I am, so it's time to start exercising. I'm a whiz at Sudoku, and the Piano Player game is a joke for me. But still, I'm terribly slow at the "Rock/Paper/Scissors" memory test, and I'm hopeless remembering the random placement of 25 numbers in a grid.

When I first started writing this post this morning, my Brain Age was 44. This afternoon, I've aged to 48. I don't care for this trend.

3 comments:

Matt....... said...

How long have you been playing? I say, when I go, I'd rather not remember a thing, and be as senile as possible. the ground hog day syndrome, thats what I want!

Mary M. said...

Please. If your mom gets any sharper, we'll all be in danger. If you want to talk about an erosion of the filters that keep that mind from commenting, perhaps too accurately, well, that's another problem. She was way more refined before she gave up smoking.

Cat Herself said...

Sounds like a really good excuse to buy a new toy. Can't computer games do similar things?