five little ducks went out to play

Woke up at 7:53 am with a massive leg cramp. No way to go back to sleep after that. Now it’s mid-morning and I’m incredibly sleepy and scatterbrained, which is unfortunate because I really need to buckle down on my case. My attention span has been horrible lately. I keep shuffling around text and rewriting paragraphs and having them come out bad or worse, and not making any forward progress.

Still mulling over the issue of my mental acuity. Is it in decline, or maybe it was never that great to begin with? A couple nights ago we were playing Overcooked 2, which is a lot of fun, 10/10 party game. But I was slower at grasping the new recipes than everyone else. A new recipe would pop on screen, and everyone would be like “oh ok you do XYZ,” and I would still be struggling to understand it as the level began. I mean, it was fine—I focused on simpler activities like chopping vegetables and washing dishes and I had a great time. But it’s concerning.

(HGR is of the opinion I have never been great at understanding things in video games, which is weirdly comforting, because at least it means I’m not getting worse.)

(HGR is also of the opinion I should do more things that are mentally engaging. All my leisure tends to be brain-off just coasting and perhaps I am simply reaping what I have sown. Train your brain blob!!)

Compare to BB, who turns 3 next month. Everyone (including me) gushes about how he is so smart and so observant and has such a good memory. There’s this song that goes: 

Five little ducks went out to play

Over the hills and far away

Mother duck said, “quack quack quack quack”

But only four little ducks came back

And so on until all the ducks are gone, and then they all come back. The other day, he belted out all six verses of the song. His mom was like “Did you guys teach him this?? We don’t really sing that song that often.” Well, Dad played the song once the weekend before (and I didn’t even think BB was paying that much attention). He just picked it up. Inhaled through the air.

Another amazing thing: children learning written language. As a small child, you have no idea that letters are fixed symbols, and associated with particular sounds, and certain combinations of them are associated with particular meanings. And no one can explain it to you, because you wouldn’t understand the explanation. You just intuit it from context. And then you go around the living room yelling “B-U-S bus!!!” because the sheer act of naming things is a joy-filled activity. It’s incredible to watch.

Little kids train their whole brains all day every day. Thinking about myself, I think the problem is that I don’t train my brain. I stick with what’s familiar instead of trying new things where I have to learn and adapt to new systems. Someone who plays a lot of games (aka everyone else) is obviously going to be quicker at picking up a new Overcooked recipe.

A couple areas where I have trained my brain:

• Color. I have so many color vocabularies floating around my brain: phthalo and cerulean and cornflower, umber and rust (and their watercolor equivalents, burnt umber and burnt sienna). Cassis, goridhe, senegal, bone. Algae is an interesting one: the FR version is desaturated and distinctly cool-toned, while the LD version is more saturated, more earthy/warm, and slightly darker in value.
• Ordering ice cream. This is weirdly niche, but I’m thinking of an incident several years ago on vacation. We wandered into a mall with a rolled ice cream shop. You pick a flavor of ice cream, up to two mix-ins, and then up to two toppings on top. To me, this was simple and intuitive. Somehow it was really confusing to Dad. Like, he just didn’t know what to pick. Mom and I made suggestions and he eventually went with that. I guess on my end it’s just experience (aka brain training) of trying out froyo shops and the like back home.

Dad recently sent us all an article stating that playing with grandkids is good for grandparents’ mental acuity. Among other things, it prompts you to exercise neural pathways that would otherwise go unused—playing games, singing songs, answering questions, helping with homework. I feel like the advice is probably rather universal for adults. Lots of rarely-used pathways up in this joint.