Category: Cognitive abilities
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?
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?
I’m teaching a class on brain fitness for the Lifelong Learning Institute at Nova Southeastern University, and once again I’m thinking a lot about what goes in to keeping your memory sharp as you get older.
The members of the class are interested in my presentation, and we’ve done several exercises to help them learn more about what they can do to maintain and improve their memory.
Nothing is more helpful than understanding how your memory works, and probably the most critical issue for older persons and their memory is attention. Although it’s obvious (once you think about it), if you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t remember it.
Even the most commons memory complaints I hear from patients are often related to memory. The number one complaint is “I went in to another room to get something and forgot why I was there.” Whenever I mention this, I see lots of nods of recognition in the audience.
For many people, this issue is caused by failing to maintain attention on a specific task. While you’re going to the other room, your mind moves on to another topic (maybe you notice something else you’ve been meaning to do). By the time you get to the other room, you’ve lost the task you were thinking about in the first place.
The solution is to maintain focus on what you want to do, at least until you’ve been able to encode the task in your memory. This means keeping the task in mind while you go to the other room or rehearsing it several times before you move to the new room.
When we’re younger, we can depend on some things in our memory working automatically. As we get older, things that used to work automatically may require a little extra attention. Often, it’s not your memory that isn’t working, it’s how you’re paying attention.
People who have heard me talk about MiamiBrainFitness (and now, South Florida Brain Fitness, or SoFlaBrainFitness) have usually heard me talk about the work Gary Small and his colleagues have done at UCLA. Several years ago, they showed that participation in a 14-day healthy lifestyle course could improve older persons’ scores on cognitive tests and change how their brains worked on brain scans.
The group recently presented a paper at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Dr. Teena Moody, also at UCLA, reports that Internet searching can improve brain function in persons aged 55 years and older. Although details of the study are only available in news reports at the moment, reports are interesting.
They show that just using the Internet for one hour a day over several weeks changed patterns of brain activation in persons without much Internet experience. In addition, after using the Internet, the same people activated new areas of the brain that may be related to working memory and making decisions.
Dr. Moody suggests that Internet searching might be a useful form of brain exercise (click here for the story on the UCLA press web site).
While these results are very much preliminary, they add to a steadily growing body of research that shows that older persons can benefit from mental activities, and those activities can make real differences in how the brain functions.
So the tip of the week is this: If you don’t use the Internet, consider giving it a try. You don’t have to invest a lot of money in a computer and special software to get started. Almost all public libraries these days have public use computers. Many libraries have people who can help you get started.
All you need to know to get started is how to open up a web browser (that the program the lets you surf the Web) and how to type “www.google.com” into the browser. Once you get to Google, you can type in a few words to find something you’re interested in. Maybe search on history or science, or to find out about a car you might buy – or look for information about a place you might want to travel to.
Something that challenges older persons about their memory is being able to remember whether they have already done something. “Did I take my medicine this morning?” is the kind of question people may ask themselves. This is very common when I talk to older persons about their memories, and is probably related to the most common complaint I hear: “I went in to the next room to get something and forgot why I went!”
Psychologists are increasingly interested in prospective memory, the ability to remember to remember something. Remembering to take your medicine is an example of this kind of problem. Closely related is the problem of monitoring this kind of regular action, or remembering whether you remembered to do something. You may find yourself asking, “Did I take my medicine today?”
A team of researchers published a study of this problem and found a way older people to remember better. Mark McDaniel at Washington University and his colleagues carried out two experiments that examined this issue. They showed that older persons made more mistakes involving remembering whether they had pressed a key on a computer than did younger people. This was especially true when both groups were doing a complex set of tasks. This had been reported before, but confirms what many older persons might report.
They also showed a way to reduce the memory errors. McDaniel and his colleagues showed that asking the older persons to put their hand on their head while they pressed the computer’s key. When the older persons did this, they performed just as well as the younger participants.
McDaniel and colleagues suggest that putting their hands on their heads helped the older persons pay attention to the fact they were pressing the key. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention for memory. If something doesn’t get in to your mind, it can’t be remembered. One of the keys for older persons to remember better is to do something that helps them focus their attention. Putting your hand on your head may help you to focus your attention while doing something you might otherwise forget.
Here’s the reference for the study:
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, Volume 16, Issue 5 September 2009 , pages 563 – 588
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Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
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.