Boost Your Brain Power!
Debbie Acklin
I didn't think much about it at first. I would be listening to someone and find that my mind would wander a bit from time to time. Suddenly, I would realize that there was an awkward silence. The other person was waiting for a response and I had no idea what they had said. It was very embarrassing.
After apologizing several times for "zoning out" during a conversation, I realized that I needed to do something about this problem of mine. It was like I had developed attention deficit disorder. One day I accidently stumbled down the right road to a solution.
I was sitting in a doctor's office, flipping through the reading material, when I came across one of those word search books. It was the kind where there is a grid of letters on each page with words hidden within the grid. You had to find the words by searching the grid. I was completely engrossed in one of these puzzles when I was called back to see the doctor. Wow! I had focused on something so completely that my name had to be called more than once.
After the visit, I went to a local bookstore and picked up several of these word search puzzle books. There were many variations on locating the words in the puzzle, but I found I enjoyed them all. In the beginning, I just started with the first word in the list, then searched the grid until I found it. This was very time consuming.
Having worked through an entire book, I began to develop tricks to find the words. I would group words that began with the same letter and search for them all at once. This speeded up my search since it reduced my passes through the grid. Then I realized that some letters were easier for me to spot than others. For instance, I can spot O, U, M, W, C, I, and L easily. So I began to group words that contained these letters.
Of course, there were several different types of puzzles. I could not use my new tricks to solve them all, but I developed other techniques for these. The important thing was that I was giving each puzzle my full attention. I was focused. I never left a puzzle undone. I always completed it before I put down my pencil. I never looked up answers in the back of the book. I stuck with it until I solved it.
One day I picked up a book to work a puzzle and something interesting occurred. I found that I could just look at the puzzle and the words would almost leap off the page at me. I found them quickly, zipping right through the puzzle. It startled me a little. I tried another one with the same result. I realized that I had trained my mind to recognize the patterns that made up common words. I began to notice that I was more focused on conversations. There were no more of those awkward silences. I felt happier and more confident.
I also realized that in the old days I had sometimes read the same line in a book several times before I focused enough to actually retain what I had just read. That seldom happened anymore. It was true. You can teach an old dog new tricks!
I thought back to younger days when I would sit and practice the piano for hours at a time. Then one day, I realized I could play the songs without the sheet music in front of me. I had not deliberately memorized the piece. My hands had been trained, from repetition, to move over the right sequence of keys.
I began to remember how constant practice in sports had improved my game. I had trophies for shooting from the free throw line in basketball because I practiced the shot hundreds of times. I could hit the basket in my sleep. I could put a ball in exactly the same place over a tennis net for the same reason. Repetition.
Somehow, I had lost sight of that simple lesson that so many teachers and coaches had instilled in me for years. Practice makes perfect. I don't do word searches as much as I used to. I have moved on to simple video games. When I master one, seeing the pattern or the path to winning repetitively, I move on to something else.
I plan to keep building those neural pathways in this old brain of mine, always searching for new challenges. Hopefully, it will serve me well for many years to come.
(772 words)