New Year’s Resolution: Focus
Brain fitness involves exercise, achieving a healthy weight, and eating well, at least as much as computer brain games. Those are all great resolutions, but to get there, you have to focus. But how? … Continue Reading
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Brain Fitness Tip: Get a Good Night’s Sleep
One of the most important ways to maintain brain fitness is by getting enough sleep.
Most of us know how we feel when we don’t get enough sleep. Research shows that lack of sleep can affect your memory, raise your blood pressure, and increase your risk of stroke.
But how do you get a good night’s sleep? … Continue Reading
Brain Fitness
Brain Training Study Off the Ground!
After overcoming a number of obstacles, our study of the effects of cognitive training on fluid intelligence has finally started. We’re enrolling participants from our local Life Long Learning Program, all of whom are 50 years or older. In the study, we are comparing the effects of working memory training …
Changes in Brain Size with Aging
Understanding brain aging has to be research priority. The average age of people in the US is increasing. This means that there are more older people at risk for diseases that occur as people get older, such as Alzheimer’s. In people, the size of the brain decreases as they get …
Exercise, Mitochondrial DNA, and Brain Fitness
One very influential theory of why our physical and mental functions decline with age holds that changes in our DNA accumulate over time so that out cells don’t work any more. Perhaps the most important part of our DNA exists in every cell in a special part called the mitochondia. …
The Default Mode Network and Brain Fitness
If brain fitness is more than just trying to avoid memory loss as you get older (and I think it is), then understanding how you think is (I think) critical. Sometimes called metacognition, this means not just thinking, but thinking about thinking. Follow that? Metacognition is the idea that we …
Mindfulness Meditation, Brain Fitness, and Gray Matter
Most people know that the brain is smaller with age, at least in part due to loss of brain cells in parts of the brain related to perception, memory, and executive processes. Anything that can slow down or reverse the process should be of interest to all of us, whatever our age. …
Worry and GAD Blog
- 5 More Steps to Cope with IrritabilityThis is a cross posting from my brain fitness blog. As it turns out, worry is probably bad for your brain fitness, so coping with worry not only can improve your mood but may also help improve your thinking and memory. Here the post: Irritability means letting small things that happen to all of us […]
- Three Ways to Deal with Unconstructive Repetitive ThoughtsSeveral researchers have shown that negative mood, anxiety, and distress can be associated with cognitive decline. Wilson and his colleague Patricia Boyle (both at Rush in Chicago) have shown with data from the Religious Orders Study that persons who are chronically distressed have a greater chance of cognitive decline. At the Cognitive Aging Summit (sponsor […]
- Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monkthe contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, […]