PUT DOWN THE REMOTE. GIVE YOUR BRAIN A REAL WORKOUT.
Turn off Netflix. You’re killing your grey cells with all those hours in front of the screen
Right, you’ve got three seconds to work out the following, and I want the answer to the exact decimal please: What’s 948 divided by 4.2? Stop, times up. So, how did you fare? Now, I’m not a glass half-empty kind of person but I’m hedging my (non-monetary) bets that it didn’t go too well. That’s what brings me to this next part. I recently found myself unwillingly thrown into an enlightening, but quite frankly, embarrassing situation here.
As a 30-something journalist, I’m in a job where I’m constantly expected to think on the go. I’d confidently put myself down as a wellread, plucky individual with something fairly substantial between my ears, but that all changed last week — on January 30, 2017.
I brazenly took on a challenge, which instantly brought on a beetroot-like blush to my freckleclad face. Picture the scene. I’m sitting on the 11th floor of some fancy high-rise building in Dubai and I’m about to go and interview — of all people — a brain trainer.
Now this was my story, so I walked into the situation feeling cool, calm and collected. But all that 180-ed within minutes.
My ever-charming subject, brain trainer Shammi Kapoor, 23, turned the tables on me and challenged me to a brain-training task. Always one for a challenge, I gracefully accepted, but more than that, as an interviewee, Kapoor impressed me on a personal level, so I felt the need to oblige. (Read more about him here: tinyurl.com/zxorg2x)
During our interview, Kapoor — a guy who was diagnosed with autism, depression and ADHD at the age of 19 — was every journalist’s dream. He was frank, open and unashamedly just himself.
I got to know that brain training was something he dabbled in as an alternative to medicating his conditions, but as we sat there, he spoke about “being different,” with a sense of pride.
“I felt like an alien all my life,” he told me, before admitting that the diagnosis finally made him feel like he found his “own race”. I respected that frankness so much — hence, my initial willingness to undergo some on-the-spot braining training.
I mean, how hard can it be (I thought)? And now I know the answer. Hard, really blooming hard. Now I’m someone who can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Even the horrified and confused look on the face of my unsuspecting victim won’t stop me ploughing into random conversation. I guess I get a kick out of putting someone on the spot.
And I think that’s something Kapoor and I share — although his approach is a lot more unintentional than mine.
Going back to my initial opening, I hit you with a near-impossible mathematics equation in a bit to try and build the panic-stricken emotions I was feeling as I walked into my brain training task.
This was me, unawares, and at my most vulnerable. I had no time to prep, nor had I cracked a Suduko in a while, so my brain was quite literally in freeze-mode.
As Kapoor professionally, and rather sweetly (after seeing the impending dread on my face) hit me with a not-so-difficult first task, I aced it. Boom. Then came the crash, bang and wallop (thanks a bunch for completely showing me up, Brain!). There were number additions, picture-card recognition tasks… all while counting out loud to an audio beat. I confused squares with circles and struggled to add 9 + 1… yep, struggled.
Despite the instant regret at agreeing to train my (rather useless) brain, Kapoor was every bit the professional and assured me I was doing just fine. But the reality hit me. I’m not the shiny, sharp tool in the box that I thought, which is where my desperation reared its head.
“How do I go about not being so terrible next time,” I asked him.
“Read,” he told me, a journalist! Food labels, comics, Shakespeare, whatever it is, “just read”.
So, next time I feel the urge to indulge in a random stranger-centric conversation, I think I might turn on my heels and pick up a packet of peanuts instead. Surely if I read the label on a famously-dubbed ‘brain food,’ that will get me double the brain training points, right? Oh, and the answer is 225.714286 by the way.
I felt like an alien all my life,” he told me, before admitting that the diagnosis finally made him feel like he found his “own race”. I respected the frankness so much, I agreed to some on-the-spot brain training.