Spa that claims to anti-age your brain
Keep losing your keys? Forever forgetting names? Time you checked in to the . . .
There’s a strange, flapper-style headband around my temples and a monitor clipped to my ear. In front of me, on a screen, emperor penguins waddle across the Antarctic, eggs balanced between their feet.
Not, perhaps, the most comfortable way to watch David Attenborough’s Planet earth, but it’s part of a plan to improve my brain.
I am at the shA Wellness Clinic in southeast spain, a luxurious hideout perched on a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean.
This is where some of europe’s richest and most influential are now heading for the new must-have treatment — a neurocognitive and brain stimulation programme designed to do for your mind what most spas do for your body.
If I had any doubts about needing some help with my memory before I arrived at shA, I certainly don’t now. I’ve managed to leave my contact lenses at home.
The brain, like other parts of the body, has a habit of playing up as you get older.
But, when other, more visible, body parts fail, we know more or less what we can do (even if we don’t actually do it).
If you start muttering ‘oof!’ when you sit down, you can join a gym, take up yoga or go for brisk walks. But what about when your brain goes ‘oof!’, the synapses are stuttering and the neurons don’t seem to be firing fast enough? When you go to the shops needing certain things and can’t for the life of you remember what two of them were? This is where the shA clinic comes in. The idea of the brain gym has been around for a while. Lots of us now play games designed to get our neurons going — so many of us, in fact, that the brain fitness market is expected to be worth $20 billion (£15.2 billion) by 2020.
And now, the shA clinic has taken the concept to a whole new level.
Dr Bruno ribeiro, the Portuguese clinical neuropsychologist and professor at the University of Murcia who is behind the programme, explains: ‘We are beginning to