BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: YOUR AUXILIARY BRAIN

One of the biggest challenges this time of year is keeping your brain fitness program going in spite of shopping, parties, family, and work. All of the usual temptations are there, plus a new group of reasons not to stick with your program.

I think one of the biggest challenges for many people in changing or maintaining a change in their fitness program is focus. When you’re managing a complex project at work, a social life, maybe worrying about getting the kids to  school play on time, and who knows what else, it’s easy to let other things slide. Sometimes it’s just basic prioritizing, but sometimes it’s because you can’t focus.

If you want to stick with a brain training program  during the season, do something to help you focus on what you want to accomplish every day, and include brain training:

• Take a few moments every morning to review your daily to-do list before beginning the day.
• Set a reminder in your cell phone or computer calendar that will pop up every day.
• Put your daily to-do list on a 3 x 5 card and post it on your refrigerator or on a mirror in your dressing area.

The key idea is not to make your brain have to remember things in a time when your life is most complicated. Figure out a way to off load some of the memory tasks to your cell phone, computer, or environment.

FREE ONLINE BRAIN FITNESS TRAINING

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.

While I doubt that most of the free games or training programs have the same impact as better-designed programs such as Dakim, Lumosity, CogniFit, or Posit, I think that it is likely that trying something new is good for your brain.

Some of you may have heard about the studies on Internet searching done by Dr. Gary Small and his colleagues. They have shown that Internet searching activates key brain centers that may be helpful in keeping your brain healthy. You can read more in an LA Times article here.

Maybe one of the keys is novelty. Doing something, almost anything, that is new may ask your brain to make new connections. Although the science is speculative, when you look at the direction that research is going it looks as though doing new things that make your mind process information in new ways may be essential in improving brain fitness.

In a recent post on this site, I talked about  reducing anxiety by not catastrophizing. Gary Dashney at www.onlinebraingamesblog.com made a comment, and that led me to look at his site. He has collected an impressive list of games, and wrote an excellent post on his thoughts on the characteristics of good brain games. You can find the article on his blog here. The site also has an extensive list of free brain games online here. Even if you don’t use all (or any) of them regularly, if you look through Gary’s list you can become more familiar with what’s on the Internet.

BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: Letting go of the old and changing

It’s been about a year since I left my position at the University of Miami and moved to Nova Southeastern University. I had worked at Miami, first as a resident and then as a faculty member, since 1992. The situation there became increasingly difficult for me, and after a particularly unpleasant meeting, I decided to resign.

There are times in your life when you know, whatever the risk, that you have to walk away from a bad situation.

I know it sounds trite, but it’s true: It was the best decision of my life. I spent the next several months working on developing my design and consulting company. Then, after some time, I had the opportunity to interview for a position at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. I accepted it.

There have been many up and downs because of the change. When I think about the change and what it has meant to how I think about myself, I know it was the right thing. It was a movement toward freedom.

And this makes me think about the elements of brain fitness. One of the most important is change or novelty. I’m dealing with new problems with new people in new situations. It sounds like a brain fitness program. I can’t always recommend changing jobs as a means to enhance your brain fitness, but I wonder if staying in any one situation in your life too long may not support making the changes you need. Changes you need not only to move on in your life and career, but also to challenge your brain to cope with new situations, people, and problems. Not to mention not having to go to work worried every day.

BRAIN FITNESS AND THE MIND OF A MONK

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.

Priscilla Warner writes about the 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, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.

What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.

If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.

BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: VARIETY

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.

BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: STOP CATASTROPHIZING!

Anxiety makes your memory worse, and worrying about your memory can make your anxiety even worse.

Just as studies have shown that stress can have a negative effect on your memory, it’s pretty clear that anxiety can make it harder to remember things, too. We’ve probably all had the experience of trying to remember a name or a word and feeling frustrated about not being able to come up with it. Paradoxically, the harder you try to remember, the less you’ll be able to do so.

So far, that’s pretty normal. Younger people have the same kind of trouble with their memory occasionally, although it may happen more frequently as we get older. It’s what happens next that makes it different for older persons.

Many of my older patients may have a problem with remembering a word or a name, but they go one step further: When they can’t remember something, they start worrying about it. They may interpret the fact that they can’t remember means they have a memory problem, maybe even Alzheimer’s disease!

Sometimes, when people start worrying about a problem, they think of the absolutely worst thing that it could mean. A cloud in the sky, for example, may mean that a tornado is coming. We call that catastrophizing. It’s not good English, but it is pretty clear what it means. It means taking a real problem and magnifying it by exaggerating it to the worst possible outcome.

How do you avoid catastrophizing? When you begin to feel worried or anxious, try to stop and consider alternate explanations for whatever you’re worried about. Could that cloud just mean that there’s a cloud, not that a tornado is coming? Odds are that the answer is yes. Is having trouble remembering annoying. Yes. Does it mean that you have a serious memory disorder or neurological disease? Probably not.

As always, there’s no substitute for a thorough evaluation of your memory by a competent clinician. An evaluation ought to include assessment of your general ability, concentration, and memory. And never forget the importance of taking care of other medical problems, such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

PIAGET AND BRAIN FITNESS

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.

BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: GETTTING 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.

How do you get a good night’s sleep?

If you feel as though you’re not getting enough sleep, or as though your sleep isn’t leaving you feeling refreshed in the morning, the most important thing is to figure out why. Some changes in sleep are normal with increasing age and may lead you to feel as though you’re not sleeping well. Click here to find out more about normal changes in sleep with aging. If you feel as though you’re not sleeping well, ask your doctor for help.

Many sleep problems can be treated. If someone tells you that you snore, you wake up with a dry mouth, or you feel just as tired when you wake up as when you went to bed, sleep apnea may be the cause. Sleep apnea is a condition that causes a person to stop breathing during the night – sometimes many times during the night. When that happens, you wake up (even though you may not remember it) and your normal sleep is disrupted.

Other causes of sleep problems include depression, too much mental activity before bed time, drinking caffeine or smoking, and bad sleep habits. You can find out more about how to improve your sleep here. The website of the National Sleep Foundation has a number of articles about sleep and how to get a good night’s sleep. Learn more about how to sleep better. Your brain will work better and you’ll feel better, too.

BRAIN FITNESS: COPING WITH STRESS

As part of my class on brain fitness at the Lifelong Learning Institute the past several weeks, I asked interested participants in the class to fill out the fourteen item Perceived Stress Scale. It’s a well known questionnaire used to evaluate someone’s level of stress. Items on the scale ask questions about how often a person encounters things that he or she can’t cope with, and also about how able the person feels to cope with stressors.

I’m interested in stress because lots of research shows that stress has a negative effect on memory. Ever since the pioneering studies of Robert Sapolsky, we’ve know that stress can harm the brain. Other research has shown a negative relation between level of stress and how well people do on memory tests.

Individuals in my class last year at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Miami did the same questionnaire. When we looked at how stress was related to how well those people did on a memory test, we saw what others have found. There was an inverse relation between stress and memory. As stress went up, memory went down.

An important part of any brain fitness program is developing a stress management program. By that I mean you should spend some time in identifying what kind of stressors you have and figure out what to do about them.

Good ways of coping with stress include avoiding the things that you can avoid (that third cup of coffee, or that family member who always upsets you) and then having a systematic way of dealing with the ones you can’t avoid.

Schedule challenging tasks for the time of day when you’ll have the most energy for them. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the things you have to do, make a list and work through them one by one. If a new task just seems overwhelming, break it down into a series of smaller tasks and work through them one by one.

Exercise and meditation help your body cope with stress as well. Regular aerobic exercise helps people manage stress. Remember to talk to your doctor about what kind and how much exercise is safe for you to do.

Meditation is deceptively simple: just stop for a few minutes a couple of times a day and spend some time breathing. For many people, I think meditation is a simple and effective way of coping with stress. It’s effects are cumulative: do it a couple of times a day for a week, and you’ll gradually develop a more relaxed and focused mindset.

BRAIN FITNESS TIP OF THE WEEK: REMEMBERING WHAT’S IN THE OTHER ROOM

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.

REVIEW: THE DAKIM BRAINFITNESS SYSTEM

The folks at the Dakim BrainFitness System were kind enough to send a unit to me to use for a few days so that I could review their program. In the weeks since I sent it back to them, I’ve had some time to think about the program and I’m happy to say that it’s an excellent alternative to other computer-based brain fitness training programs.

Unlike most other programs, the Dakim System isn’t a software package that you have to install on your own computer. It arrives in a box, complete with a computer that’s already set up with the program. All you have to do is open up the box and plug in the computer.

And the computer that comes with the system is the most user-friendly machine I’ve ever seen. The initial set up is explained to you by the computer over speakers that are built in to the unit. And you don’t have to use a keyboard or a mouse to use the system. You just touch the screen to answer questions as the computer is set up. That’s also how you interact with the computer when you start the training program.

The training program includes a nice variety of tasks that tap attention, memory, and problem solving. The tasks use materials that are likely to be familiar to users over 50, such as movie clips from old films, and change quickly enough to keep you from getting bored. The unit can be connected to the Internet to get updated materials, so you will be able to use the System for a long time to come. The new material requires that you pay a monthly subscription, though, so that’s an extra cost of the system.

The program has multiple levels of difficulty, so you will be able to make steady progress as you work with it. The program is just right for many users over 50, but doesn’t include tasks that focus on working memory (remembering more than one thing at a time and then thinking about them) and it’s not clear to me how well it will help you develop processing speed (how fast you can take things in and make decisions about them).  Other programs include these tasks, but in our experience they may be too difficult for many users. The Dakim System is likely to be accessible to almost every user.

Overall, then, the Dakim BrainFitness System is probably best suited for people who don’t already have a computer and don’t already know how to use a mouse and keyboard. The touch screen format makes the unit very easy to set up and use. The program content will give users a regular mental work out that will help them keep their brains working. I give the Dakim BrainFitness System an A+ for usability. The program content will help users keep the minds active, and will help you track your progress.

Update at 2:15 PM:The folks at Dakim point out to me that several of the subtests do, in fact, help train working memory. I stand corrected.  They also let me know that they’re working on a speed of processing task for inclusion in a future update.

ABOUT THE BRAIN FITNESS PROGRAM

The Miami Brain Fitness Program was developed by Dr. Ray Ownby in order to create a new program to help you maintain your mental fitness after 40. Many of us feel our brains don’t work quite as well as they did — research shows that cognitive abilities may decline after our teens. The Miami Brain Fitness Program puts together existing research on computer training, diet, exercise, supplements, and stress management to help you create a personalized brain fitness program to keep you at your peak.

Sign up for our newsletter by clicking on “Register” at the left to make sure you’re up to date with the what’s going in brain fitness. A feature of this website are weekly brain fitness tips.

The program is headed by Dr. Ray Ownby, a neuropsychiatrist and neuropsychologist with more than 30 years’ experience.

Contact Dr. Ownby at Enalan Communications, Inc., if you have more questions about the program. E-mail us at info@enalan.com or go to our contact page by clicking here.