Page 277 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

Enjoy Your Ageless Mental Agility • 261

GLUTTON

This game improves your ability to concentrate. You will
need a pair of dice and an opponent. The object of the game
@ is to roll the dice as many times as you like on your turn,
adding up the pips on the dice with the goal of eventually
reaching 100. However, if you roll a 1 on either die, your
score stays the same. If you roll snake eyes (a 2), your turn is
over and your score reverts to 0. Otherwise, add the total of
the pips to your score. End your turn when you decide to or
if you roll snake eyes. Then the other person begins to roll
the dice. The first person to reach 100 wins.
Try to predict when you might roll snake eyes. Deter-
mine how likely it is to roll them. Develop a strategy for
winning this game. If you are lucky, you can get to 100 on
one turn without rolling snake eyes. How much luck do you
think there is in this game? Can you compensate with a
clever strategy? How lucky do you feel today?
At the beginning, you may want to use a paper and pencil
to keep the totals. As you increase your concentration powers,
you will want to keep the totals in your head, for both players.

FIGURE AND GROUND
Whenever a figure is drawn in a frame, the space becomes
divided into two sections: the figure (or foreground) and the
ground (or background). For some highly visual people
with great spatial-relationship skills, the figure and ground
readily change places. Consider the drawing in Figure 7-12.
Let’s say this figure shows steps in your home. Are you
looking at them from above or from below? It depends on
what part of the picture your mind assigns to the back-
ground and what part it assigns to the foreground. When
the foreground is in the lower left corner, it appears that the
steps are below you. However, if you can make your brain
decide that the foreground is in the upper right, it appears
that the steps are above you, as if you were standing on a
basement step looking up.