Focus is more than a model of car

I have been playing the Elevate brain training app for a while now. It helps improve your memory and focus, with games centering on reading, writing, speaking, math, and listening. The games are quick and fun and it only takes a few minutes each morning to play the three random daily games you get with the free version. Some of the games I like better than others. I find the “Visualization” game in the reading module incredibly easy (I’m in the 99.99 percentile on that one) and some of the math games incredibly hard (I hate you fractions).

I do very well in Reading, Writing, and Speaking. Math and Listening; not so well. I told my wife my scores the other day and she was in no way surprised that my listening scores were even lower than my math scores. Then she said something else, but I confess I wasn’t paying attention.

I noticed a trend the other day in the game’s scorekeeping methodology. I am close to reaching the next level in Writing. If I have a good game score (excellent or great) I inch one or two points closer to the next level. If I have a bad score, I slip 10 points further away. The rewards are small, the punishments large.

Mostly I started this training app because hypochondriac me was worried my memory was going. I was granted one gift at birth, an extraordinary memory. In the last decade or so I found my ability to recall slipping. I knew the Jeopardy answers, I just couldn’t get them out fast enough. My Elevate memory scores are very high. I guess it is just age. The synapses don’t fire with the same alacrity. Perhaps the file cabinets in my brain are so full of “stuff” it just takes longer to find the right fact in the right file. Maybe my memory is failing. It could be I’m just sliding from “excellent” to “above average”. I had another point, but I cannot remember what it was.

I’m not going to share my scores. It is embarrassing.

OK,  since you asked:

My average across all games is 4316. Reading is my highest and listening my lowest score. The Name Recall exercise is dragging me down. * 5,000 is the ceiling.

*It is true, I can remember pages of numbers, passages from books, and most any date. I will forget your name before we are done shaking hands.  This is a horrible attribute for a salesman. Thank goodness for business cards.