Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day

Platform: DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Review Code

It's been a long, long time since I've thought very deeply about math. I was just finishing community college (be nice) and had one credit left to satisfy my mathematics requirement. I could have gone for the home run, but decided to take Calculus, just to prove to myself that I could. In high school, I'd bombed the class -- mostly because I was a lazy, longhair who thought he knew everything.

I got an "A" in Calculus and haven't exercised that side of my brain since. Now, ten years later I discover that I've allowed the analytical side of my brain to atrophy. I'm awful at small, quick mathematical calculations. Even more scarily, I've discovered that I don't really care what 8x7 is. I know that it's a constant that can easily figured out with a couple seconds of thought, but long gone is my ability to reproduce the figure in a breath.

My first Brain Age test charted my noggin at about 60. Embarrassing. Within a day, I was able to bring my age down to a more reasonable number. And now, I'm working on the tricky part -- getting my brain age down to the optimal 20-years-old. It's no easy task, at least for me -- a person who's been living the writer's life for a decade.

I'm betting, though, that even the sharpest whips will get a bit of challenge out of the many puzzles and memorization tests the game throws at you. The game does have some limitations. My closed "4" doesn't read on the touch screen. And I've had problems with voice recognition of the word "blue." So, on top of brushing up on my arithmatic, I'm also polishing my handwriting and elocutions skills.

I'm also finding myself won over by Sudoku. At first, I was reluctant to try these puzzles, but I'm finding them stimulating in a robot-mind sort of way.

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