Use it or lose it!

Pilot study by Alzheimers Australia (WA) finds regular brain exercises are the key to healthy ageing

Just two hours of brain exercises a week can markedly improve a person’s mental capacity and help fight age-related memory loss according to a recent study by Alzheimer’s Australia WA.

· Participants found improvements in their memory and were able to follow conversations better.
· Brain has the ability to change in response to new learning.
· Exercising the brain reduces the risk of developing dementia in later years.

The “Brain Fitness Pilot Project” involved people aged in their 60s, 70s and 80s from retirement villages and seniors fitness centres, taking part in a structured brain fitness program two hours per week over an eight-week period.

The program consisted of a series of computer-based hearing exercises aimed at sharpening a person’s ability to take in speech so that the brain can hear and remember more details.

While a majority of participants reported an improvement in their train of thought and could remember names and shopping lists better, another 70 percent found an improvement in their hearing and their ability to follow and remember conversations.

Alzheimer’s Australia WA Chief Executive Officer Frank Schaper said the study demonstrated that a regular program of brain exercises will reduce the impact of cognitive decline as a person grows older and can lead to healthy ageing.

See original article here.

Imagine being distracted even when no one is distracting you. It is a frustration like no other… the reason is because you couldn’t blame it on anybody else but yourself.  However before you go beating yourself up about it, understand this: It may not be your mistake at all. It might be your boss’s problem.

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, sleeping might enhance your productivity just as brain exercises would.  A large number people today just don’t have adequate sleep.  They drink caffeine in an effort to increase productivity… however the fact is, sleeping let your brain to work at its best. The following are several advantages of sleeping… and afternoon naps!

1. A study had discovered that a 20-minutes afternoon nap, enhance your memory like memory exercises do. This study was backed by a test NASA did: Their aviator improved their performance by 34% through having a short 26-minute afternoon sleep!

2. Sleeping is necessary to consolidate the things you have acquired in your waking time. The more better you sleep, the more you’ll remember whatever you’ve learned yesterday.

3. According to scientists from Washington University School of medicine, your brain require sleep to make room for new learning. That means, sleeping is like the process of shelving. When you sleep, you brain shelved what you have acquired today memory improvement in this way you could learn new knowledge for tomorrow.

4. Sleeping, useless to say, improves concentration just because your brain will cease battle against itself on two different goals: Staying awake (your conscious mind) and shutting down (your subconscious). Trust me, your subconscious mind will always score.

5. Even EXPECTING afternoon sleep had been shown to reduce blood pressure.

Note: In regarding to to how many hours of sleep, no one really knows. The common “8 hours” of sleep is the same useless advice as “8 glasses of water”. The amount relies on a few things which include: age, puberty, the quantity of work you do, what type of work and so on. Try and see how many is the best for you.

So there, your employer objectives to increase productivity by appointing you to work through the afternoon may not be such a great idea after all.

Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people.

It’s already known that long-term consumption of a high-fat diet is associated with weight gain, heart disease and declines in cognitive function. But the new research shows how indulging in fatty foods over the course of a few days can affect the brain and body long before the extra pounds show up.

To determine the effect of a fatty diet on memory and muscle performance, researchers studied 32 rats that were fed low-fat rat chow and trained for two months to complete a challenging maze. The maze included eight different paths that ended with a treat of sweetened condensed milk. The goal was for the rat to find each treat without doubling back into a corridor where it had already been. The maze was wiped down with alcohol, so the rat had to rely on memory rather than sense of smell.

All of the rats studied had mastered the maze, finding at least six or seven of the eight treats before making a mistake. Some rats even found all eight on the first try.

Then half the rats were switched to high-fat rat chow (comprised of 55 percent fat), while the remaining rats stayed on their regular chow (which had 7.5 percent fat). After four days, the rats eating the fatty chow began to falter on the maze test — all of them did worse than when they were on their regular chow. On average, the rats on the fatty diet found only five treats before making a mistake. The rats who stayed with their regular food continued the same high level of performance on the maze, finding six or more treats before making a mistake.

Read rest of article here.

July 20, 2009
BY BRAD SPIRRISON chicagotechmatters@gmail.com

While popular exercise-focused video games like those played on Nintendo’s Wii Fitness appear to have some health benefits, brain games designed to enhance mental fitness are striving for clinical and commercial acceptance.

“We are learning that people can push out the natural effects of aging by playing cognitive games,” says Jim Hanekamp, founder of Glenview-based My Fit Brain.

Hanekamp, 53, started the company last year after his mother began to show early signs of Alzheimer’s. His research showed that while brain exercises could do little to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s, they could positively impact neural growth earlier in life. This, in theory, could delay memory loss and other effects of brain aging.

The former corporate technology director has invested about $70,000 and months of salary-free time to develop a suite of brain training games found at www.myfitbrain.com. Games with titles like “Pair Em Up” and “CodeBreaker” test memory and logic function, and increase in difficulty based on the cognitive capacity of the user.

While Nintendo and neuroscience specialist Lumosity market paid and subscription-based games, everything on My Fit Brain is free to the user. Hanekamp, who has recruited 1,200 registered users and thousands more visitors to the site, hopes eventually to make money from advertisers.

“We have a new, patent-pending way to incorporate advertising within the game itself,” he said.

Although Hanekamp has had a tough go landing advertisers and investors — he was told he needs between 10,000 and 100,000 registered users to be a viable marketing channel — the company has contained costs by outsourcing its development to India and hosting the site on Amazon’s cloud computing service.

My Fit Brain is marketed largely via word-of-mouth, fueled by an instructive and regularly updated blog on the site that focuses on cognitive fitness issues.

Chicago Sun-Times article by Brad Spirrison

Throughout the day you collect lots of miscellaneous facts. Almost none of this gets put into long term memory until you sleep. If your sleep too short, some of it gets left out of long term memory never to be heard from again.

Think of it like this: you have just thrown everything in your apartment on the floor, thus nothing is organized. Eventually it would be hard to find things. In trying to find specific items, you break your belongings, unless of course, you are extremely careful. So, you call a maid in to clean up while you step out.  The maid is smart and knows exactly where to put everything so you can find it later.

When you sleep, it is like that smart maid comes into your brain.  Your brain goes into hyper drive to clean up all the facts from the day and put them away for long term retrieval.  Some facts that were not very important and you thought about only once get discarded so as not to clutter up your long term memory.

If you only sleep a short time, it is like interrupting the maid.  Not everything is cleaned up and put away.  Some people have more efficient maids and only need 6 hours of sleep, but most people need more to get all the information from the day cleaned up and organized.

People who go days without sleep really begin to see drastic effects.  If they go long enough without sleep they can even begin to hallucinate.  The human brain has evolved to only hold so much information before it needs to get organized.  Its like reaching a point when you your is so full of stuff you can longer walk around in it, much less find anything.

If you fall asleep with a problem on your mind, your brain will even work on that while you sleep.  Sleep is an especially good time for the brain to work on problems that you are stuck on trying to figure out.  Your brain can be very creative during this time and often you can awake with a brand new solution to try.  So, do not stay awake trying to figure it out, but sleep on it.

So for your brains sake, get a full nights sleep so that all the prior days information is properly put away and you can begin a new day with lots of room for new information.

If you are over 25, your brain is atrophying unless you are pushing it to its max.  Read this article to see several ways to keep your brain optimized.

We spend hours at the gym, eat right and go for our annual physicals and eye exams. But the most important organ in our bodies is often the most neglected, says cognitive fitness expert Rebecca Shafir.

Keeping the brain fit, she says, is critical for people’s long-term health.

“You have to use it or loose it,” Shafir, author of “The Zen of Listening,” says of the brain. “As brains age, there is atrophy just like muscles and it slows as it becomes more dormant.”

Shafir, a speech and language pathologist and neurotherapist at Harborside Counseling Services in Newburyport, provides brain fitness training for baby boomers over 50 and seniors who want to preserve and advance their cognitive skills. She also works with adolescents and adults with attention deficit disorder, head injury and stroke.

While physical activity is a good thing, Shafir says, brain exercises are important as well. By practicing a few simple exercises each day, she says people can stave off some of the effects of brain aging, improve their memory and be able to recall items more quickly and precisely.

Getting older is unavoidable, but falling apart mentally or physically is not. The biological mind-body connection becomes more important as you age. After all, a sound mind won’t do you much good if your body fails.

Loss of memory or cognitive decline shows up in the little things first. You have a harder time calling to mind the names of people and places, you have something at the tip of your tongue but just can’t remember what it is, you go into a room to get something and can’t remember what it was. The prefrontal cortex, which is your search engine for your memory, can’t call it up. Everyone has this happen at some point in their life. When this happens, the hippocampus kicks in to provide other associations to try to jog your memory, but those names and places which used to come easily become more difficult.

Brain-function research shows that as you age the cells throughout your body gradually lose their ability to adapt to stress. In the brain, when neurons get worn down from cellular stress, synapses erode, which eventually severs connections. Dendrites physically wither, and you start losing a signal here or there. Losing a signal here or there isn’t such a big deal at first, because the brain is designed to compensate by rerouting information around dead patches in the network and recruiting other areas to help with trafficking. The good news is your brain is a social network; it thrives on making new connections and is constantly rewiring itself and adapting – provided there’s enough stimulation to spur the growth of new neurons.

Memory is possible because of your neurons. Neurons are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system that process and transmit information. Neurons never actually touch each other. They reach toward each other across a gap (synapse) with their axons and dendrites (tiny hair-like filaments that project out).

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