“Brain Age” is a game (of sorts), played on the Nintendo DS handheld, that is intended to “help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs.” The Brain Age site is pretty careful not to make grandiose claims about what the game will do for your mental abilities. However, the site does make a variety of quasi-scientific assertions — most of which boil down to the idea that you can increase your blood flow to the brain by regularly challenging your noggin with Brain Age’s mental calisthenics. Brain “age” is the overall measurement that the game uses to allow you to track your progress. In other words, if you’re forty years old and you have the brain age of an eighty-year old, you have some work to do…

All this is interesting, but the reason for the post is the amusing videos of people trying Brain Age for the first time. I felt tremendous sympathy for them as they struggled through the simple-seeming, but actually quite complex, exercises. And then even more so when their “brain age” was actually revealed. Put it this way: no one was pleasantly surprised.

I’m thinking of getting Brain Age for my Mom as a holiday gift. Do you think she’ll take it the wrong way?

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