Archive for April, 2009
When I have given talks about brain fitness, many people ask me about dietary supplements. A number of supplements are promoted for maintaining brain health, and some may actually have promise. It’s pretty hard for most people to sort out the research on dietary supplements. This is what I suggest to people who ask me about supplements:
First, I warn everyone that supplements aren’t as well researched as regular drugs. This may mean that some supplements work better than we know. It may also mean that they have side effects that we don’t know about, or that may interact with other supplements or regular prescription drugs. So if you intend to take any supplement, be aware of the risks.
Of all the supplements for brain fitness, one of the most promising is already recommended by the American Heart Association. Omega-3 fish oils have been shown to have benefits for the cardiovascular system. Although it may be possible to get enough fish oil from eating fish several times a week, many people can’t eat fish so regularly or are worried about how much mercury they might get from the fish. Fish oil are readily available as capsules. Depending on your condition, you may want to take from 1 to 4 grams of fish oil every day. You can read the AHA’s recommendations here.
As I mentioned, there is little information about any supplement and brain fitness. In one study, a small group of people with very mild cognitive problems appeared to benefit from fish oil supplements. More and more, it’s becoming apparent that there is a close link between cardiovascular risk factors and brain fitness. This means, I believe, that most of the things we can do to improve cardiovascular health are probably good for the brain. The same blood vessels that are critical to keep blood flowing to the heart and the rest of the body are present in the brain. In fact, the most metabolically active organ in the body is the brain. So anything you can do to improve vascular health is likely to help your brain.
In teaching a class on memory for people over 50, I found out a number of interesting things. One of the most important is that it confirmed something that I already knew from research studies – many apparent memory problems are actually problems with paying attention.
It looks as though your mother may have been right when she said “Pay attention!” Several studies have shown that lapses in attention may affect what you remember. As I often tell my patients, if it doesn’t get into your brain, you’re not going to be able to remember it.
As part of a brain fitness class I taught last year, we did a memory exercise drawn from a workbook about memory titled The Memory Workbook (by Douglas Mason, Michael Kohn, & Karen Clark). In the exercise, everyone looked at two cotton balls and spent a few minutes learning to appreciate their color, texture, and shape. By the end of the exercise, everyone felt that they could tell the two apart, and remember each one clearly.
What does this seemingly trivial exercise show? If you pay close attention to something you can remember it better.
What does this have to do with those troubling memory lapses? A lot. As we get older, attention doesn’t focus as automatically as it did when we were younger. We’re more easily distracted. The solution is to focus, focus, focus:
- If you’re doing something mundane such as washing the dishes, spend some time using your senses to appreciate what you’re doing. Think about the warmth of the water, the smell of the soap, and the sounds the water makes.
- If you’re taking a walk, don’t spend the whole time thinking about what you’re going to do later. Take time to attend to the wind in the trees, the colors of the leaves on the trees, and the sensation of weight in your shoes.
- When you’re driving, don’t lapse into a coma while thinking about where you’re going. Think about where you are, and check the mirrors to see who’s in back and on your sides. This has a bonus: it may make you a better driver.
- If you meet a new person and want to remember his or her name, take a few seconds to rehearse the name in your mind. Use the person’s name as soon as you can. Say “It’s nice to meet you, Bill (or Mary)” rather than just saying hello.
These are just a few examples of ways to enhance your attention during every day life. If you try, I’m sure you can find many other ways. Let me know if you find them.
You can get the The Memory Workbook at Amazon on a store link that I set up. Click here to go to the store, and browse this and other books on brain fitness.
One of the most interesting findings in the field of computer-based cognitive training is based on a study by Susanne Jaeggi and her colleagues that showed that a specific kind of mental exercise can improve fluid reasoning ability. This finding is important and exciting for several reasons. One is the effect of a very small amount of training (as little as 20 minutes a day) on what many people think is a basic mental ability. The other is the idea that any kind of basic ability can be improved.
The computer-based training involves a procedure called n-back training. It’s been used for a long time in neuropsychological or cognitive assessment activities as a way to evaluate working memory. In single n-back, you have to remember, for example, the position of an object that appears intermittently in various positions on a computer screen. If you’re doing the task, you have to press a key on the computer when the object appears in the same place. In single n-back, you would watch to see if the object appears in the same two times in a row. If you are doing 2 n-back, then the object has to appear once in a specific place, then can appear somewhere else on the screen, and then appears again in the first position. The number refers to how many positions back you have to keep track of. It can go up to as many as 6 back.
In dual n-back, you have to do two n-back tasks at the same time. The other one can be auditory, for example. One task asks you to listen to numbers played on the computer’s speakers, with the same basic task. You have to remember whether a number you hear is the same as the one you just heard, or heard before the last one, and so on. It’s easier to understand if you try it out.
You can try it out in several places for free. It can be pretty challenging, but the original study showed that how well a person did the task didn’t matter so much as that the person did the task at the level that worked for them. Doing the task is a great way of training your attention, and another study has shown that this kind of training can make changes in the brain’s chemistry.
You can find try the task out at Soak Your Head (this site requires a browser plug-in called Silverlight, so you may see a message about installing it) and you can download a version for your own computer (free) at Brain Workshop. Another free online version is at The Mindflow.
Latest
- Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monk
- Brain Fitness Tip: Training Without a Computer
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. (more…)
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.