Chapter Six

My Brain Goes to Gym Class (But at Least It Doesn’t Have to Play Dodgeball)

Do I seem smarter than I did in chapter five? Since then I’ve spent untellable hours in front of my computer, challenged by earth-shattering problems like which tiles on the matrix were momentarily highlighted, how to maneuver a penguin through a constantly rotating maze, and how many more drills I must complete before I am smart enough to date Harold Bloom. If it were not for these distractions, dumb ol’ me could have finished writing chapter eleven by now.

Remember when video games were considered the pastimes of sketchy children, whose addiction, if left unchecked, could lead to a life of crime and poor eyesight? Now we call these games brain exercises and hope and trust that our digital exertions will make us as mentally agile as preteens wielding M27 assault rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. They—the games, not the guns—are to mental health what kale and juice cleanses are to nutrition.

“Improve your brain performance,” beckons one online cognitive training website, “and live a better life.” “Achieve up to 1500% increase in brain function,” is the come-on from a “learning enhancement” outfit. Let’s be honest: Wouldn’t it be great if I could prescribe a regimen of computer workouts I’d devised and guarantee that if you played them ten minutes a day, you’d never ever have any mental boo-boos as long as you live and that you’d always remember the name of that lady you keep running into on the elevator? With more baby boomers reported to be afraid of losing their minds than of dying, the worried well—and also a few who aren’t doing so hot—spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain fitness. I’d be so rich! Er, what I mean is that helping others turn back their cognitive clocks would bring me immense joy.

Do these programs really work? Define work. Never mind. Nobody can agree on that anyway. What is beyond arguing about is that these games make you better at these games. Keep practicing Leap Froggies, and sooner or later you will become a pro at getting all the brown frogs to the rocks on the right side of the screen and all the green frogs to the rocks on the left side. OK, but what if your ambitions are loftier than successfully regrouping a bunch of animated amphibians? Will becoming super-duper at playing computer games translate to sharper overall cognitive performance? Will it enable you to differentiate Emma Watson from Emma Stone from Emma Roberts from Emma Woodhouse? Help you remember where you parked the car? Help you remember you don’t own a car? Provide you with the mental capacity to understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe? (See me if you know the answer. We can share the Nobel.) Moreover, will those benefits be long-lasting? Such is the hallowed mission of all brain game designers. You can answer either yes or no to these questions, and either way you will be in the company of reputable scientists.

There are studies that conclude exercising your brain makes you a more logical problem-solver and more capable multitasker, improves your short-term memory, boosts your IQ, delays mental decline by ten years, lowers your risk of an automobile crash, revs up skills that would make you a more reliable air traffic controller, tunes up your motor coordination so that you can perform laparoscopic surgery optimally, helps you manage physical pain, and makes you happier—and also sexier. (Not really about that last one.) Controlled studies have shown that after just ten hours of cognitive conditioning, gains can persist for as long as ten years. I have also read studies—and meta-studies—that dispute each of these studies, followed by critiques of those critiques.

One of the most influential studies (and one that has been both proven and disproven too many times for my little hippocampus to keep track of) was done in 2008 by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, who demonstrated that playing a certain memory game enhanced the player’s intelligence. The game in question was based on the n-back task. Subjects were shown a sequence of rapidly changing screens on which a blue square appeared in various positions. At the same time, a series of letters was recited to the group. The subjects were then asked whether the screen and/or letter matched the corresponding items from two cycles ago. Depending on the subject’s performance as the game progressed, the number of cycles he or she was asked to remember increased or decreased—hence the n in n-back. And you thought charades was hard to follow. Doesn’t this game sound like a barrel of laughs? Fun or otherwise, the longer the subjects played, claimed Jaeggi and Buschkuehl, the better they scored on tests that measured general intelligence.

A few years earlier, a researcher in Sweden, Torkel Klingberg, showed that children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could become smarter if they played memory-augmenting computer games. I am mentioning Torkel Klingberg here because I love his name. Also, as you will see if you consult Google Images, he is very cute.

It was partly as a result of the n-back findings that many scientists started to believe that the wrinkly guck inside our skulls might be trainable. Given that supposition, we were a mere metaphor away from the proposal that we can have hunky brains if we just do a few exercises—not unlike the way you lift weights and do abdominal crunches to stay as buff and adorable as ever. This is not an unreasonable theory.

How come you can’t just do crosswords? To everyone who has solved today’s puzzle: Sorry, but this is no guarantee you will end up less nutty than the rest of us. Says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO of SharpBrains (the market research firm concerned with brain health, in case you’ve forgotten), “Once someone has done hundreds or thousands of puzzles, the marginal benefit tends toward zero because it becomes just another routine, easy activity—probably a bit more stimulating and effortful than watching TV, but not enough to bring benefits other than becoming a master at crossword puzzles.” If you’re practiced enough to know that auk is a diving seabird, it’s time to learn sign language or take up the tuba. The key to staying sharp, says Fernandez, is to challenge your brain continually with a variety of novel activities—in other words, become a serious dilettante.

Clues:

ACROSS:

1. Hey, you!

3. Up in the sky, look: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a bear.

6. Approximately when I’ll get there

8. The side of the ship you want to be on if you don’t want your hair to get messed up

11. You should have bought an apartment here a long time ago when all the artists lived here. Now you can’t afford even a latte in this district.

12. Ew! Gross! What happened to your eye? (And why are you spelling the disease with an e at the end?)

13. Where you are when you’re puking from all that rolling, pitching, and yawing

DOWN:

2. A dagger from Ye Olden Days. One letter different from another word you don’t know (11 down).

4. Goddess whose children were swallowed by Cronus, who was her brother and husband. Awkward!

5. No matter how bad your memory is, this is something to remember

7. Nest for eagles who don’t have a fear of heights

9. Son of Seth; grandson of Adam. What, you don’t read the Bible? Then: The Dukes of Hazzard spin-off.

10. Holy moly!

11. Pirate in Peter Pan (see 2 down, if you feel like it)

ANSWERS:

Instead of games, then, why not invigorate your brain by playing bridge, becoming a chess master, curing a disease, or untangling your earphone cords? Because: Isn’t it easier just to pay $9.95 a month and push some buttons on the electronic device of your choice?

Yes.

Enter the entrepreneurs. Within the last few years, enough brain fitness products have been developed by neuroscience companies to give each of your synapses its very own personal training program. Here is a partial list of companies and programs: MindSparke, MyBrainSolutions, Brain Spa, brainTivity, Brainiversity, Brain Metrix, BrainHQ, Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, Nintendo’s Brain Age, Advanced Brain Technologies, Cogmed, Lumosity, MindHabits, NeuroNation, and HAPPYneuron. I predict that as long as there is a thesaurus, this list will grow.

By far the biggest purveyor in the field is Lumos Labs, the neuroscience research company that sells the Lumosity training program. As of April 2015, this brain trust, which has grown 200 percent every year since the launch of its software in 2007, had sixty million subscribers in at least 180 countries. This is about the same as the population of Italy.

One of the subscribers is me. Another is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Secretary of State John Kerry, who began using Lumosity on her iPad after she had a stroke and credits the program with accelerating her recovery, but this isn’t a self-help book for Theresa. Every day I, Patty, am presented with five games in my in-box.

This is the part where I should probably describe how to play all of these games, but that would be as peppy to read as the booklet on how to care for your new washer/dryer unit. Suffice it to say, each task seems to have been specially tailored to make me feel bad about a specific mental faculty (memory, attention, speed of processing, flexibility, or problem-solving, depending on the game). Moreover, most of the challenges are timed, and so, as the clock ticks, my heart pounds like a Gene Krupa solo. I am especially undone by the game Raindrops, which calls on the player to solve equations that reside inside descending raindrops before those numeral-filled drips reach the ocean. Under this kind of pressure, can anyone be expected to add even 1 + 1? (Brain scans of subjects who are afraid of math show that the mere thought of having to do math triggered responses in the subject that looked just like the images of someone experiencing physical pain.) Also nerve-destroying is Brain Shift, which requires one to, ever so speedily, press the right arrow key when the number is even or the letter is a vowel, and the left arrow key when the number is odd or the letter is a consonant. This doesn’t sound hard but, believe me, people have telephoned 911 for less.

According to the Lumosity website, in the past 103 days, I have played 876 games. I know what you’re thinking: “5 × 103 does not = 876. No wonder she is having trouble with simple arithmetic.” You are probably also thinking, “Is she on steroids?” Or, if you are my mother, you are thinking—actually, saying, “You’re sure you’re not doing too many exercises? What if something in your head snaps?” Here’s the thing: The reason my count is this ridiculously high is that so determined am I to have an enviable LPI (Lumosity Performance Index) that I play each game not just once but repeatedly. Feel free to substitute the word repeatedly with until the cows come home. A session is supposed to last about ten minutes. Mine can last up to two hours. Lumosity recommends three to five workouts a week. I never miss a day. Now you are really starting to wonder about me, aren’t you? Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, then, that in addition to those completed games I’ve chalked up, I’ve started many others and then, sensing that things were not going well, thrown in the towel and pressed restart, blaming my bad performance on my computer or on hearing my boyfriend breathe in the next room or, though we haven’t met, sometimes even on you, who I so don’t want to disappoint. The next game, I tell myself, will be perfect. Is this cheating? Sort of, I guess. Pathetic? You bet!

LPI is like the Dow-Jones average of your brain. The number goes up or down daily, depending on your performance that day—as well as on previous days. The index is based on an algorithm that takes into account the scores of millions of players. Thus you can not only feel bad by comparing your today self against yesterday self, you can also feel bad by lining up against those in your age group or any other age group you choose. This is the only advantage to getting old I can think of—that your Lumosity competition is not as stiff. Tip: Whatever you do, don’t compare yourself against the twenty-to twenty-four-year-olds. They are the worst, by which I mean the best.

As anyone would predict, my LPI increased over time.

Do these scores translate to increased intelligence in my so-called real life? I guess we’ll find out soon. In the meantime, isn’t it curious that on one of my absolute highest-performing days, as I was setting up the Lumosity app on my phone, I forgot my password?

Are You Smarter Yet? (Part One)

Is this book doing its job? Here’s a diagnostic crossword to help you find out if you are less stupid than you were on page one. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t complete this puzzle within two hours. If you’re stuck, give me a call, and I’ll provide a hint. Ready? Don’t be afraid to answer

YES.