Brain Age Craze

For Christmas Julia was given a game for her nintendo DS called Brain Age. Really less of a game and more of a workout for the mind it capitalizes on the idea that you can actually keep your brain young and nimble by excercising it through certain kinds of activities like math, pattern matching, reading aloud, concentration skills etc.

Watching Julia play with it it became interesting to me so at some point over the holidays I picked it up and began to play with it occasionally. The first thing it has you do is measure your current "brain age" which I did. This was a somewhat disheartening exercise because it told me that I had a brain age of 65. Now that is not bad if you are 65 or older but being that I am 41 I found that a bit depressing. I tried to rationalize this by saying that having three small children kept me in a relatively sleep deprived state but that didn't really work. So I became determined to see if I consistently used Brain Age if there was a difference in how I felt mentally and to see if I could lower that darn score!

Well I am please to say that after practicing the various exercises for about a month I've now been able to lower my "brain age" to 46 which is respectable but leaves me with a way to go. They say the best possible age is 20, not sure if I will get there but I'll keep trying. I also see that there is a Brain Age II so if anyone is looking for birthday gift ideas!