No More Brain Games (National Post March 11, 2009)
-
National Post
- March 11, 2009
Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Wednesday, March 04, 2009
I have a strong need for Canadian-style social approval, so I tell people I'm not the competitive type. The truth is I am insanely competitive, and also a very sore loser --not a good combination.
I admire my son's approach to competition -- thrilled with victory, but gracious (because cheerfully confident he'll do better next time) in defeat. Once, when he was adolescent, I played a board game called Risk with him. It's a kind of war game for dummies. Players divide the globe between them and "fight" for world domination.
My "troops" were literally wiped off the map. In the shaming inchoate rage that followed this definitive rout, as country after country under my command fell to the (insensitively crowing) "enemy," I vowed never to play Risk or any other competitive board game again.
When competing against myself -- essentially what I do every week -- I can handle writing alongside master journalists whose intellectual and rhetorical hems I am not worthy of touching. Professional defeat means publishing writing or argumentation that is beneath my own standards. A salutary volley of mockery from readers is a spur to greater effort and attention the next time around, the kind of failure I accept with humility.
But what I can't handle is being defeated by an objective rating system that "proved" I was an inferior writer. I used to think my insecurity around direct face-offs was a gender thing. But a recent humiliation convinced me otherwise.
A month ago, a female colleague -- I won't identify this frequent Post contributor, a libertarian Belleville, Ont., lawyer I'll simply call "Karen" -- enthusiastically recommended I sign up for an ongoing course of brain games at a site called Lumosity.org. Karen said that after a month of playing Lumosity's easy, cognition-sharpening games, she had noted a definite improvement in her short-term memory.
Short-term memory loss is frustrating for anyone, but especially so for an ageing writer imbibing cascades of information and watching most of it run through a mental sieve that was once a capacious basin. It's the bane of my existence. So I accepted Lumosity's offer of a two-week trial.
Karen was right about the games being easy, at least at entry level. You do spatial perception tests, time-sensitive "mathematics" (6 + 2 = ?) and short-term memory and logical deduction games any six-year old could handle with aplomb.
The verbal game was naturally a particular snap for me. They give you three letters to start -- like "con" -- and then you have to create as many words as possible from them within a minute. They even let you piggyback multiple extensions of the same root (converse, converses, conversing, conversation, etc.), so it's pretty mindless.
Every time you finish a game, the screen lights up with your new "Lumosity number." You go from Lumosity 1 to Lumosity 36 to Lumosity 50 suspiciously quickly, it seemed to me. But since you're working at your own pace and have no idea what these numbers signify, and since your agility at doing the games improves with familiarity (the site tracks your daily scores), you naturally feel you are pretty smart and getting smarter. The trial period was all so unthreatening, and the cost so reasonable--$10 a month-- that I signed on for more.
All was proceeding swimmingly --I was visiting the site almost daily and feeling increasingly lumosificious -- when Karen informed me that Lumosity was adding a new feature: You could now compare your scores to those of other Lumosity users!
Karen informed me she had availed herself of the option and found she was in the 97th percentile! "And," she added rather cheekily, "I'm so competitive that I'm embarrassed to say I was a little disappointed about the missing three percent."
Naturally I now had no choice but to find out my own percentile. Reader, I am officially brain dead. My overall placement was, if memory serves (which it doesn't for important stuff, but for this embarrassment, alas, very well) 57. My verbal score was slightly higher. In spatial perception I ranked in the third percentile (that is, yes, three, not three-oh).
Needless to say, I cancelled my subscription at the first opportunity, and I dare say a number of similarly deflated other users did too. Which doesn't say much for the creative minds at Lumosity.org that came up with the idea of letting people who think they're pretty smart find out how dumb they really are.
Life has gone on pretty much as it did before Lumosity burst my bubble of self-esteem. Except of course I now spend the time I used to devote to Lumosity sticking pins in a little voodoo doll of Karen. Who is so very very brainy that her Lumosity score is probably a billion by now. Like I care.