Two ways to stay mentally sharp....
Today's post: Monday, 1-19-2009
1. One way is getting regular exercise, ideally by doing some strength training, some interval cardio, and some lower key activities such as Tai Chi, gardening, walking – or even doing housework – every week.
We’ve already posted that exercise helps you to stay mentally sharp in several ways.
Regular exercise helps you to keep your blood sugar from getting too high; it directly and indirectly ensures your brain has good blood circulation; it helps you lower or overcome the effects of stress; it literally grows new brain cells; and it helps normalize your neurotransmitters enough to help keep you un-depressed and proactive.
All of this combined ensures that you retain something researchers now call “brain plasticity.”
Essentially that means that not only do you learn and think better, your brain also can be dramatically “trained” or “re-trained” even when your brain needs to rewire itself or use different parts of itself to do so.
2. Researchers are now beginning to find that certain kinds of brain exercise also can use this brain plasticity to cause you to upgrade or acquire new skills – or to regain skills grown rusty from disuse.
Even better, these brain exercises either can cause permanent improvement or long term improvement. It’s more like learning a language or relearning it than regular physical exercise. It may take a lot of work to get results. But once you do the work successfully, you apparently keep the skill as long as you continue to make some use of it.
Posit Science, see www.positscience.com , was founded by one of the most important and innovative researchers in this new field.
They seem now to have two programs.
One uses a video game to ensure you process information well, accurately, and quickly visually -- whether it’s straight ahead or off to either side or up or down. This can make you a safer driver as a younger person. And, it can enable you to continue to drive as an older person where you otherwise might not have been able to do so.
Their second program apparently has been used to restore brains of older and elderly people to mental ability levels now usually seen in people in their 30’s, 40’s, or early 50’s. That literally means you can make your brain younger in its abilities, sometimes more than 20 years younger.
Since a similar kind of exercise, learning a second or new language, sharply reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, there is even reason to believe getting this training is an additional way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
But there’s more.
People who lose arms or legs or hands can still feel as if the part of them they lost is still there. (It’s called the phantom limb phenomenon.) Worse, sometimes they can have really bad and continuous pain in their phantom limb.
People also get strokes that leave them unable to speak or paralyzed on one side.
Researchers have now found that because of this brain plasticity, there are exercises people can do that will turn off the feeling from a phantom limb, including the pain in it if they have any.
And, in many cases, people who have been paralyzed or unable to talk after a stroke have been able to come close to completely overcoming paralysis or to regain speech.
There is even some chance this science will be able to turn off some addictions.
We’ll post again on brain plasticity soon.
But until then, be sure to follow our guidelines we’ve posted over the last week on how to keep your brain sharp; and be sure to do regular exercise if you don’t do anything else. Also note that doing those things will help ensure you will do well with the brain exercises if you do them.
Or, you can learn something totally new to you. Examples would be learn Tai Chi, learn to play a musical instrument, or learn a new language.
Today's post: Monday, 1-19-2009
1. One way is getting regular exercise, ideally by doing some strength training, some interval cardio, and some lower key activities such as Tai Chi, gardening, walking – or even doing housework – every week.
We’ve already posted that exercise helps you to stay mentally sharp in several ways.
Regular exercise helps you to keep your blood sugar from getting too high; it directly and indirectly ensures your brain has good blood circulation; it helps you lower or overcome the effects of stress; it literally grows new brain cells; and it helps normalize your neurotransmitters enough to help keep you un-depressed and proactive.
All of this combined ensures that you retain something researchers now call “brain plasticity.”
Essentially that means that not only do you learn and think better, your brain also can be dramatically “trained” or “re-trained” even when your brain needs to rewire itself or use different parts of itself to do so.
2. Researchers are now beginning to find that certain kinds of brain exercise also can use this brain plasticity to cause you to upgrade or acquire new skills – or to regain skills grown rusty from disuse.
Even better, these brain exercises either can cause permanent improvement or long term improvement. It’s more like learning a language or relearning it than regular physical exercise. It may take a lot of work to get results. But once you do the work successfully, you apparently keep the skill as long as you continue to make some use of it.
Posit Science, see www.positscience.com , was founded by one of the most important and innovative researchers in this new field.
They seem now to have two programs.
One uses a video game to ensure you process information well, accurately, and quickly visually -- whether it’s straight ahead or off to either side or up or down. This can make you a safer driver as a younger person. And, it can enable you to continue to drive as an older person where you otherwise might not have been able to do so.
Their second program apparently has been used to restore brains of older and elderly people to mental ability levels now usually seen in people in their 30’s, 40’s, or early 50’s. That literally means you can make your brain younger in its abilities, sometimes more than 20 years younger.
Since a similar kind of exercise, learning a second or new language, sharply reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, there is even reason to believe getting this training is an additional way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
But there’s more.
People who lose arms or legs or hands can still feel as if the part of them they lost is still there. (It’s called the phantom limb phenomenon.) Worse, sometimes they can have really bad and continuous pain in their phantom limb.
People also get strokes that leave them unable to speak or paralyzed on one side.
Researchers have now found that because of this brain plasticity, there are exercises people can do that will turn off the feeling from a phantom limb, including the pain in it if they have any.
And, in many cases, people who have been paralyzed or unable to talk after a stroke have been able to come close to completely overcoming paralysis or to regain speech.
There is even some chance this science will be able to turn off some addictions.
We’ll post again on brain plasticity soon.
But until then, be sure to follow our guidelines we’ve posted over the last week on how to keep your brain sharp; and be sure to do regular exercise if you don’t do anything else. Also note that doing those things will help ensure you will do well with the brain exercises if you do them.
Or, you can learn something totally new to you. Examples would be learn Tai Chi, learn to play a musical instrument, or learn a new language.
Labels: benefits of exercise, make your brain younger, older drivers, phantom limbs, prevent Alzheimer's disease, protect your brain, restore brain functions, safe driving, stay mentally sharp, stroke cures
posted by David at 1:07 PM
2 Comments:
Hello, David.
This is a very exciting field. I believe that we're on the cusp of an era of much better knowledge about how to maintain or improve our brain health and function.
Posit Science is a leader in the field of brain training, but unfortunately its products run very expensive (around $400 each). My own company publishes a product that uses the most effective brain training protocol available and costs a fraction of the price.
The training is based on Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl's study on -- Improving Fluid Intelligence by Training Working Memory (PNAS April 2008) -- which recorded increases in mental agility (fluid intelligence) of more than 40% after 19 days of focused brain training.
I was so impressed that I contacted the research team and developed a software program using the same method so that anyone can achieve these improvements.
Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro
Martin
www.mindsparke.com
Effective, Affordable Brain Training Software
Since some readers may want such programs this is an interesting comment. It's rare that individual people will find a $400 plus program affordable. So this is welcome news.
(I think Posit Science sells to organizations where a good bit more than one person uses their programs.)
Also, here's the title and author of the book I saw Saturday that had the information.:
The Brain that changes itself by by Norman Doidge, M.D.
This is a very important book.
For example,I had heard that there were things such as hyperbaric oxygen and the standard rehab that could be done for stroke victims. However, until I read that section in this book, I was unaware that there was a separate restorative method to allow people to move paralyzed parts of them or recover speech that actually worked.
Apparently the recovery ranges from near 100 % to 70% when it works. And, it hasn't worked for everyone they've tried it on. But it apparently works quite often and has worked in people where it wasn't started until years after their stroke!
This is important stuff. I'm surprised it wasn't front page news when it was discovered and that it hasn't become common knowledge. It sounds like even stroke rehab centers and doctors who treat stroke victims may not yet know of it.
And, the other exercises also spoken of in the book now developed that are similarly based on brain plasticity are almost as exciting.
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