Posts Tagged ‘cognition’
When I look back at the number of visitors to this site, I can see a big spike in visitors around the time I wrote a post on free brain training software. It appears that a lot of people are looking around the Internet for free opportunities to keep their brains sharp.
Although there has been a lot of interest in some corners about the benefits of dual (or even triple) n-back training, much of the research on brain training shows that training across several cognitive domains may be the best way to maintain your brain fitness.
Studies across sites and with different techniques are consistent in showing that multi-domain training is probably the best way to go. That means, first, doing training activities that require both verbal (words) and visual skills. That would mean not only doing something like crossword puzzles (a verbal skill) but also working on doing mazes or a computer-based visual game.
Although the research on cognitive training doesn’t really provide too much guidance, it’s my opinion that it may be a good idea to train on a variety of activities. Why? Given the likelihood that what may stimulate the brain to grow new connections is change, it’s probably important to do something new regularly. Just doing the same activity over and over again may not be the best way to keep your brain fit.
Jean Piaget was a researcher who lived early in the 20th century and had a big impact on developmental psychology. He studied his own children and developed a theory of how mental abilities develop that has been extremely influential.
One of Piaget’s key ideas is that we organize information in mental structures called schemas. You might have a scheme for how a car works. You know about how gasoline is used and how the air intake and electrical systems work. Then maybe one day you learn about a problem with how the air filter works on your car. It would be new information, but you would easily be able to incorporate it into your overall schema of how a car works. When it’s easy to put information into an existing schema, Piaget called the process assimilation.
But something else could happen. What if in the next few years we all have electric cars? All your information about air filters and gas pumps would no longer be relevant. You would have to develop a new schema, or modify the existing car schema to have a new major category for electrical cars. When the new information means that you have modify an existing schema, Piaget called the process accommodation.
What does this have to do with brain fitness? If you look at the kind of activities that seem to be the best for increasing brain fitness, it looks as though they are activities that require accommodation rather than assimilation. It may be helpful to spend your time learning new vocabulary words (assimilating new information to the language you already know), but it may be better to spend time learning a new language (accommodating your existing schemas to include new ways of expressing meaning).
So my suggestion is that what’s best for brain training will be activities that are really new to you and make you change your habitual ways of thinking about or seeing world.
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.
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- 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.