Quick – what is 8×4?
If you even have to think about this question for longer than a few seconds, then you should brush up your brain power with Nintendo’s Brain Age series for the Nintendo DS handheld game system. And if you are pregnant or post partum, then you really should put a Nintendo DS and Brain Age 1 and 2 on your wish list (or WishPot list).
Ever heard of baby brain or mommy brain? These are terms used to describe the memory impairment suffered by new mothers, which can supposedly affect you for up to a year following the birth of your child. In my case, memory impairment started early, a few months before my son Oliver was even born. I’d be standing in the grocery store, pregnant and looking confused, wondering what the heck I was doing in aisle three. Or I’d be at the office working on something really important, but unable to remember how to put a sentence together. It got even worse after my baby was born (though some of that was probably due to sleep deprivation). If you’ve experienced this effect as part of your pregnancy or postpartum period, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. In fact, even if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s likely that your husband or partner does (I’m sure my husband was on to me before I realized that my brain had gone soft).
Basically, Nintendo’s Brain Age games provide you with daily brain exercises to stimulate and challenge your mind, and specifically target the prefrontal cortex of your brain. From math problems to literature passages to word scrambles and memory sprints, each exercise takes only a few minutes to complete, very important if you have your hands full with a newborn baby or multiple children. After only a few weeks of ‘exercising’ my brain with the Brain Age games, I could actually feel myself getting smarter, and Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the Brain Age narrator, would verify my progress by giving me an update each time I turned the DS on (although I found him to be increasingly annoying with his smug little daily tips). Also, the occasional Brain Age checks (which are basically a series of quick exercises to tell you what your ‘brain age’ is – I was something like 65 when I started, but after a few weeks I was below my body age!), helped me to track my progress and motivated me to keep practicing. I have never been good at simple math (I’m the person using my fingers to add things up at the store), but I have to say that the math problems in both Brain Age games helped me to improve my basic math skills dramatically. I may even be smarter now than I was when I attended university. Okay … maybe not, but I’m certainly smarter than I was after giving birth to my two children!
Where can you get your hands on a Nintendo DS and Brain Age 1 & 2? Check out the following retailers – a Nintendo DS system will set you back about $129.99 USD, while each Brain Age game costs about $20 USD.
