Written by Marianne Mansfield
I’ve been casting about for a topic for this week’s offering, and nothing grabs me. Net neutrality perhaps? But I’m certain there are numerous subtle nuances to that topic of which I am woefully unaware.
What to expect of the lame duck session of Congress? Not much to write about there. The short answer is NOTHING.
What caused the small scale earthquake near here the other day? Fracking? (No one suggested that. I just imagined it.) Or was the cause something more insidious like a satellite installation of Section 51? (Again. I just made that up.)
This week I’m feeling unprepared to speak in an informed manner about those subjects in the news that interest me. What is this columnist to do? I think I’ll go train my brain.
Yes, I’ve fallen victim to the ads about training one’s mental capacity into a higher state of performance. Now, daily I attempt to strengthen my gray matter with apps on my phone from Elevate, Peak and Luminosity (the free version.) The ads assure gullible souls like myself that with daily use, in a short amount of time I might see my mental agility skyrocket to that of, say, Stephen Hawking, who is about the smartest person I can think of at the moment.
Each app offers a daily ‘work-out’ which consists of three to five timed tests. The groups of tests, which they prefer to call programs, deal with verbal skills, focus, memory, problem solving, mental agility, and a wide variety of other “critical cognitive skills.”
Actually, the programs are much like games one would find in the newspaper: crosswords, sudokus, and word searches, but dressed up in the latest, most dazzling technology. For example, today in one of the apps, I was to answer three questions about the literary tools used in a short passage about a girl looking through a photo album.
On this, I did well. Given the fact that I was once an aspiring novelist, that should be a foregone conclusion. The second task presented to me was to identify the grammatical errors in sentences as quickly as possible. Swipe to the right for no error, and to the left for error. I’ve struggled in the past with these directions and my score has plummeted because of it. Time matters.
However, I’ve found that if I say the instructions out loud before I begin (Right, right. Left, wrong.) I succeed. Again, I would expect to do well on this sort of task, and I did, recording my best score since I’ve been playing these games. The final task, however, made me wince when it popped up on the screen. Known as Mathematical Discounting, my job was to compute the discounts affixed to certain prices, and then to rank all the prices presented on the screen in order from lowest to highest. The results were not pretty.
My problem with the games involving numbers is my speed, or lack there-of. I can figure out the discounts, but it takes a precious lot of time. To make matters worse, the app has devious and cruel ways of making you painfully aware that time is running out. Ticking clocks, dimming screens. In my case, that translates to, step up your errors, girlfriend, time’s awastin’.
So, the question becomes this: of what value is this silliness? Is the brain a muscle that can be strengthened by repetition? The answer is both no and yes.
No, the brain is not a muscle. Technically, at the anatomical level it is an organ. Based on the type of cells found in it, the brain is definitely not a muscle. But yes, certain areas of the brain can expand, like muscle tissue, with protracted use. According to http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/insidebrain/yourbrain.htm London cabbies have very large hippocampi, the part of the brain that handles spatial mapping. The greater size is presumed to be attributable to nearly non-stop use when the cabbies are at work.
For me, somewhat encouraging, but within context. Repeated practice will likely make me better able to calculate discounted prices more quickly, for instance. And my skill with words, while good, might get better. I can always hope. But I don’t expect that any amount of practice with games on my phone will make me any better able to summarize and verbalize my views on net neutrality.
There are no shortcuts here. Study is what it will take for me to understand why lame duck sessions of Congress are so stagnant.
And that earthquake? I’ll leave that to the seismologists.
Unless there is a discount involved.
