It's an 8!

Recently – I use recently in the loosest terms possible here, boy time flies when you’re not blogging – I called one set of my parents, only to be informed that my mom couldn’t come to the phone. The reason she couldn’t talk to her one and only beautiful, radiant daughter? She was testing her Brain Age on her Nintendo DS.

Huh? And what?

Apparently it’s some game that allows you to see at what age your brain functions. I guess the younger your brain’s age the smarter you are, and this machine is supposed to tell you? I was skeptic to say the least.

But as luck would have it I was headed home that very weekend, so I could test it out myself. I was still pretty skeptical when I got to Tulsa, and my Mom and Marvin were telling me that their brain ages were both in the twenties, the lowest you can get. Which lead me to believe that this was a lot easier than they were leading on to believe, after all these are the people who are overcome with wonderment at the sight of frozen ice cream in gas stations.

So I grabbed the white contraption and sought out to prove them wrong. And it went a little something like this:

NINTENDO DS: Instructions, instructions, blah, blah, blah… colors… blah, blah, blah… words… speak answers… instructions, instructions… time limit of two and half mintues.

TWEETS: Yeah, get on with it, got it, hmm okay. So young my brain is!

NINTENDO DS:












TWEETS: Blue.

NINTENDO DS: nothing.

TWEETS: BLUE.

NINTENDO DS: Nothing

TWEETS: BLUE. BLUE. BA. LOU. BLUUUUUUUUUUE. BLUE. BLUE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IT’S BLUE! (and so on for two and half minutes)

NINTENDO DS: Your brain age is 87. Also you kinda suck at instructions.

MOM AND MARV: Snicker. Giggle.

My mom pipes up that I was supposed to say the color of the text and not the actual word. Oooooh, it’s a challenge. I get it.

Unfortunately, your brain age is a lot like your credit score and once it goes bad, you’re screwed. My brain was going to be 87 for years.

Marv told me to play some of the other games to help lower my brain age, plus I secretly suspect he enjoys mocking me. He offered up “Calculations,” which involved solving 20 simple addition and multiplication problems as fast as you could – preferably in 20 seconds.

This first time I completed the game it took me 3 minutes and I missed 5. Yep, still 87 years old.

But some of the problems were not entirely my fault. First, the game involves you using a stylus to write out the correct answers and frankly the NINTENDO DS does not like the way I write my eights.

For example, I write:



And NINTENDO DS says: You write a zero. And also get better at PhotoShop.

Apparently I need to make my eights like this:


I say: Screw you and your 8s.

So now not only our my parents cooler than me, they’re now a lot smarter than me and their penmanship is in better shape as well.

What’s happening here?