Dubai dude is proof. Reading is great for the brain.

Turn off Netflix. You’re killing your grey cells with all those hours in front of the screen

Right, you’ve got three seconds to work out the following, and I want the answer to the exact decimal please: What’s 948 divided by 4.2?
Stop, times up. So, how did you fare? Now, I’m not a glass half-empty kind of person but I’m hedging my (non-monetary) bets that it didn’t go too well. That’s what brings me to this next part. I recently found myself unwillingly thrown into an enlightening, but quite frankly, embarrassing situation here.
As a 30-something journalist, I’m in a job where I’m constantly expected to think on the go. I’d confidently put myself down as a well-read, plucky individual with something fairly substantial between my ears, but that all changed last week — on January 30, 2017.
I brazenly took on a challenge, which instantly brought on a beetroot-like blush to my freckle-clad face. Picture the scene. I’m sitting on the 11th floor of some fancy high-rise building in Dubai and I’m about to go and interview — of all people — a brain trainer.
Now this was my story, so I walked into the situation feeling cool, calm and collected. But all that 180-ed within minutes.
My ever-charming subject, brain trainer Shammi Kapoor, 23, turned the tables on me and challenged me to a brain-training task. Always one for a challenge, I gracefully accepted, but more than that, as an interviewee, Kapoor impressed me on a personal level, so I felt the need to oblige. (Read more about him here: tinyurl.com/zxorg2x)
During our interview, Kapoor — a guy who was diagnosed with autism, depression and ADHD at the age of 19 — was every journalist’s dream. He was frank, open and unashamedly just himself.
I got to know that brain training was something he dabbled in as an alternative to medicating his conditions, but as we sat there, he spoke about “being different,” with a sense of pride.
“I felt like an alien all my life,” he told me, before admitting that the diagnosis finally made him feel like he found his “own race”. I respected that frankness so much — hence, my initial willingness to undergo some on-the-spot braining training.
I mean, how hard can it be (I thought)? And now I know the answer. Hard, really blooming hard. Now I’m someone who can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Even the horrified and confused look on the face of my unsuspecting victim won’t stop me ploughing into random conversation. I guess I get a kick out of putting someone on the spot.
And I think that’s something Kapoor and I share — although his approach is a lot more unintentional than mine.
Going back to my initial opening, I hit you with a near-impossible mathematics equation in a bit to try and build the panic-stricken emotions I was feeling as I walked into my brain training task.
This was me, unawares, and at my most vulnerable. I had no time to prep, nor had I cracked a Suduko in a while, so my brain was quite literally in freeze-mode.
As Kapoor professionally, and rather sweetly (after seeing the impending dread on my face) hit me with a not-so-difficult first task, I aced it. Boom. Then came the crash, bang and wallop (thanks a bunch for completely showing me up, Brain!). There were number additions, picture-card recognition tasks… all while counting out loud to an audio beat. I confused squares with circles and struggled to add 9 + 1… yep, struggled.
Despite the instant regret at agreeing to train my (rather useless) brain, Kapoor was every bit the professional and assured me I was doing just fine. But the reality hit me. I’m not the shiny, sharp tool in the box that I thought, which is where my desperation reared its head.
“How do I go about not being so terrible next time,” I asked him.
“Read,” he told me, a journalist! Food labels, comics, Shakespeare, whatever it is, “just read”.
So, next time I feel the urge to indulge in a random stranger-centric conversation, I think I might turn on my heels and pick up a packet of peanuts instead. Surely if I read the label on a famously-dubbed ‘brain food,’ that will get me double the brain training points, right? Oh, and the answer is 225.714286 by the way.
Something to think ABOUT
Ever wondered where the term ‘baby brain’ came from?
Well, it is estimated that a baby loses about half their neurons before they are even born. Now if that’s not a tough start in life, I don’t know what is.
A bit of a blood sucker
For those who are partial to a vampire flick, you’ll enjoy this fact. Approximately 20 per cent of the blood flowing from the heart is pumped to the brain. Yep, it’s a bit of a hog.
Brain myths
Myth #1: You only use 10 per cent of your brain.
Actually, this is wrong, you use your entire brain. The truth is, we use virtually all of our brain every day. Like right now, just reading this involves engaging your frontal and occipital lobes.

Myth #2: A person’s personality displays a right-brain or left-brain dominance.
Nope, that’s nonsense. The two sides of the brain are intricately co-dependent. You may have heard that you can be ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’ and that those who favour the right are more creative and those who favour the left are more technical. But brain scanning technology has revealed that the two hemispheres of the brain most often work together in complex processing.
kelly@khaleejtimes.com