Free Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties by Patricia Marx

that
auk
is a diving seabird, it’s time to learn sign language or take up the tuba. The key to staying sharp, says Fernandez, is to challenge your brain continually with a variety of novel activities—in other words, become a serious dilettante.

Clues:
    ACROSS:
    1. Hey, you!
    3. Up in the sky, look: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a bear.
    6. Approximately when I’ll get there
    8. The side of the ship you want to be on if you don’t want your hair to get messed up
    11. You should have bought an apartment here a long time ago when all the artists lived here. Now you can’t afford even a latte in this district.
    12. Ew! Gross! What happened to your eye? (And why are you spelling the disease with an
e
at the end?)
    13. Where you are when you’re puking from all that rolling, pitching, and yawing
    DOWN:
    2. A dagger from Ye Olden Days. One letter different from another word you don’t know (11 down).
    4. Goddess whose children were swallowed by Cronus, who was her brother and husband. Awkward!
    5. No matter how bad your memory is, this is something to remember
    7. Nest for eagles who don’t have a fear of heights
    9. Son of Seth; grandson of Adam. What, you don’t read the Bible? Then:
The Dukes of Hazzard
spin-off.
    10. Holy moly!
    11. Pirate in Peter Pan (see 2 down, if you feel like it)

 
    ANSWERS:

    Instead of games, then, why not invigorate your brain by playing bridge, becoming a chess master, curing a disease, or untangling your earphone cords? Because: Isn’t it easier just to pay $9.95 a month and push some buttons on the electronic device of your choice?
    Yes.
    Enter the entrepreneurs. Within the last few years, enough brain fitness products have been developed by neuroscience companies to give each of your synapses its very own personal training program. Here is a partial list of companies and programs: MindSparke, MyBrainSolutions, Brain Spa, brainTivity, Brainiversity,Brain Metrix, BrainHQ, Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, Nintendo’s Brain Age, Advanced Brain Technologies, Cogmed, Lumosity, MindHabits, NeuroNation, and HAPPYneuron. I predict that as long as there is a thesaurus, this list will grow.
    By far the biggest purveyor in the field is Lumos Labs, the neuroscience research company that sells the Lumosity training program. As of April 2015, this brain trust, which has grown 200 percent every year since the launch of its software in 2007, had sixty million subscribers in at least 180 countries. This is about the same as the population of Italy.
    One of the subscribers is me. Another is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Secretary of State John Kerry, who began using Lumosity on her iPad after she had a stroke and credits the program with accelerating her recovery, but this isn’t a self-help book for Theresa. Every day I, Patty, am presented with five games in my in-box.
    This is the part where I should probably describe how to play all of these games, but that would be as peppy to read as the booklet on how to care for your new washer/dryer unit. Suffice it to say, each task seems to have been specially tailored to make me feel bad about a specific mental faculty (memory, attention, speed of processing, flexibility, or problem-solving, depending on the game). Moreover, most of the challenges aretimed, and so, as the clock ticks, my heart pounds like a Gene Krupa solo. I am especially undone by the game Raindrops, which calls on the player to solve equations that reside inside descending raindrops before those numeral-filled drips reach the ocean. Under this kind of pressure, can anyone be expected to add even 1 + 1? (Brain scans of subjects who are afraid of math show that the mere thought of having to do math triggered responses in the subject that looked just like the images of someone experiencing physical pain.) Also nerve-destroying is Brain Shift, which requires one to, ever so speedily, press the right arrow key when the number is even or the letter is a