How to keep your brain sharp
It’s about more than doing puzzles, or remembering what you needed in a room. Cindy Krischner Goodman talks to the experts. ‘‘You want to stimulate your brain in such a way that you challenge the brain to do more than it normally would.’’
Do you forget what you walked into the bedroom to get? One of the most common fears people have as they grow older is losing their memory. Keeping your brain healthy and your memory sharp is about more than doing puzzles, or remembering what you needed in a room.
In South Florida, experts are using new approaches to fight off memory loss. Rather than Sudoku and crossword puzzles, their approaches to a mental workout or ‘‘brain fitness’’ involve everything from building physical muscle to meditation to following a recipe. And they recommend starting brain fitness well before the senior years.
‘‘It’s important to start practising whole brain fitness now, because the process of cognitive changes can start 20 years before symptoms present,’’ gerontologist Beverly Sanborn says.
Sanborn says a full mental workout includes six categories of brain fitness: critical thinking, body movement, step-by-step sequencing, learning something new, devising analytics solutions and doing regular long-term memory exercises.
For example, with critical thinking, you debate a topic from the opposite viewpoint with which you agree. With body movement, you use your mind and body simultaneously to learn the movement. With learning, you look up a new vocabulary word and use it for a week, or substitute new words for cliches you use regularly.
With sequencing, you follow a recipe or instructions for building that require steps and measuring. With long-term memory exercises, you take quizzes or tests that require you recall information you learned in the past.
‘‘You want to stimulate your brain in such a way that you challenge the brain to do more than it normally would,’’ says
Sanborn, who is incorporating whole brain fitness activities into programming for Belmont Village, a senior living community that will open in Fort Lauderdale in early 2020.
You want to exercise regularly, too, she says. ‘‘Every year there is more and more research that shows exercise is essential to maintaining your mental fitness.’’
Only a small number of people – 5 per cent – get Alzheimer’s disease before age 65. Still, with more than
5.8 million Americans of all ages living with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers hope to learn more about the onset, causes, and progression of the disease. ‘‘While people recognise there is not a cure, they have an interest in trying to delay symptoms,’’ Sanborn says.
In Miami, Dr Marc Agronin operates mind fitness workshops at the new MIND Institute at Miami Jewish Health. At weekly workshops in the MIND gym, people work with a coach to challenge their brains through activities that include computer games, musical activities like ‘‘name that tune’’, origami making and language translation.
‘‘What we are doing is challenging them, and people have different levels of capacity for that,’’ Agronin says about the Meaningful Minds Brain Fitness Program.
At this time, there is virtually no conclusive evidence that vitamin supplements touted as memory boosters can prevent or delay memory lapses. The same is true of medications. So far, the medications for memory loss only delay the worsening of the disease for a period of time. Trials for a variety of new drugs are under way.
‘‘Sometimes people think because there is no cure for memory, there is nothing you can do,’’ Agronin says. ‘‘That’s absolutely untrue. There are so many things you can do.’’