Thankful: That My Brain is Still in Working Order

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus...

Philippians 2:5

 

A couple of years ago, my daughter introduced me to lumosity.com, a website for training your brain - or, in my case, keeping your brain active and alive.  Lumosity has a whole raft of games for speed,  vocabulary, short-term memory, and many other components.  I really enjoyed many of the games, especially Word Bubbles Rising - a timed game that calls on your word memory bank.  I would try to link into Lumosity every day, or at least several times a week.  Then the website decided they needed to crank up the charges for playing their nifty brain games, and the $79.99 price tag knocked me out of the ring.

To prevent the grey matter from getting rusty, I now turn to brainbashers.com for my daily mental stimulation.  Brainbashers has logic games aplenty, puzzles, Japanese word and number puzzles, crosswords, fill-in's, and every other conceivable puzzle you might think of.  I start my Internet day with the daily jigsaw puzzle (48-piece classic cut), then move on to Japanese nonogrids - my favorite numbers game.  I have to be careful - I could literally waste half a day doing this stuff.  But my brain gets its morning exercise, and my memory gets a little practice.

Doctors believe that brain stimulation staves off Alzheimers.  In a recent study by the University of California-Berkeley, brains scans revealed that  ...people with no symptoms of Alzheimer’s who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease [UC Berkeley New Center].  If reading, writing and playing games can help to prevent dementia in later life, I am happy to make Brainbashers a daily morning habit.