Brain Exercises

While I was on the way to the bridge tournament in Boston I read an article in a Toronto newspaper that I brought along for some entertainment while driving.  It talked about new understanding of the brain and how scientist now understood that your brain works in an analogous way to your muscles.  It grew and developed if you used it. 

Now that made sense since we had bridge people had been claiming for years (with some statistics to back it up) that bridge players were mentally sharper even in old age.  The article claimed that researchers had developed brain exercises that would effectively reverse some or all of the effect of aging on your mental capabilities.

I have been doing a little thinking about how aging affects bridge play and had some discussion with others.  The main things people have said is that they think more slowly and are more likely to forget a convention or an understanding or they can’t remember what exactly what happened on previous tricks.

So if you can use brain exercises to reverse this affect you would have all the advantages of experience and remove these disadvantages.  You might even unlock brain capabilities you never had fully.  This sounded very worthwhile and I planned to research it further.

Last night while I was trying to get caught up on the wacky events with the Canadian government I caught a problem on the Canadian Broadcasting Company which talked about these exercises and how they had helped children with severe learning disabilities, stroke or accident victims and seniors too.  So that sent me off to search the web to see what I could find.  I am determined to try this out and see if it will help me to play better.

The first exercise for bridge players is of course to play bridge.  So I am going to make sure that I play and/or watch for at least 1/2 hour pretty well every day as painful as that will be for me.  Apparently doing two things at once is helpful but I do at least three things at once most of the day so I am not too worried about that side of things.

Bridge players need: memory. concentration, deduction and logical reasoning.  I found a website called www.fitbrains.com.  From their site ….

I am going to spend time on this site (and some others) over the next while and see what I think and report back.  I am also going to do more research on the subject and would be interested in your comments.  The whole thing is hardly a hardship for me since I love to play games of all sorts.

Another area that is important is exercise.  I have slacked off in that area for a bit so now is the time to get started.

I wonder if I will notice an improvement.