Brain Games

When I think of aging , I mostly think that I would like to be able to be old and still remember where I live and what my children’s names are.  If keeping your brain sharp and active is important to you, as it is to me, here’s some information that may give you, as it did me, a little motivation.  Even in old age, the brain can grow new neurons. If we put severe mental decline caused by disease aside, most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. Research also shows that the brain grows stronger and sharper as long as you continue to use it. For example, avid reading into your golden years (whoever thought up that term?) continues to increase the rate of speed that you read and the amount of information that you are able to comprehend and retain. All of our abilities get better with time if we continue to use them, including problem solving skills.

If we continue to challenge and engage our brains with activities such as continued learning,  activities that require us to think on our feet and assess information quickly and accurately, and continue to stretch our brain muscles, our brains will definitely reward us with increasing good memory and cognitive skills. According to Ronald Kotulak, author of Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works, “The brain is like a block of marble, and we have to use outside experiences to shape it into a working organ. Experience sculpts neural networks for language, vision, thinking and other capacities. ” Simple things, like more formal education, can contribute to intellectual stimulation of the brain and may even strengthen the brain cell networks to help in preventing mental function damage.  So, the message is take care of your brain so it can take care of you.

So, now you may be wondering how I’m doing with brain exercises, and how they may be helping in my quest for youth. The brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, 900 billion glial cells, 100 trillion branches and 1,000 trillion receptors and reacts to stimuli in a series of electrical bursts, spanning a complex map of connections. However, if you have a severe concussion you lose a lot of those neurons and that complex map of connections.  That’s what happened to me, but the right nutrition and mental exercises has brought most of that back and learning new material is moving faster than ever.

Here’s a  good website for mental exercises :

http://www.eons.com/brain-games

Not just any game, such as crossword puzzles, will do. Joe Hardy, PhD, a cognition neuroscientist who develops brain plasticity training programs, says, “The key thing in terms of exercise for the brain: You need to do new things, thus forming new paths.”  Hardy has been developing brain games for the San Francisco-based company Posit Science. The games — the Brain Fitness Program and Insight — have been tested in several randomized clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. The results indicate that the brain age clock can roll back 10 years.

So let’s keep exercising our brains until we’ve rolled back the clock 10 years or more.