Last week I wrote about some very healthy, happy centenarians and talked about a recent study on people aged 100+ that found some commonalities across those living long and well. Today I saw that Dr. Mark Lachs has just come out with a new book called Treat Me, Not My Age which purports to give practical advice on living into very old age while remaining healthy and active. Lachs has two basic categories of things he looks at, which I expected to be physical fitness and mental fitness. Much to my surprise, there is little mention of mental health, but rather an emphasis on creating a safer environment. I ask this question: what good is it to be 100 years old and physically fit if my mind is gone?
While it’s true that many older adults live in homes that are not best structured to support their physical conditions, and there may be appropriate fixes to make, this is exactly the kind of thinking that makes me mad. The idea that your only chance at longevity involves installing a bar in your shower or getting brighter lights in your home or turning up your hearing aid is frankly depressing, while the idea that you can consciously and purposefully engage your brain in ways that maintain and even improve your mind into older age is invigorating.
We know that that Posit Science brain training turns back the clock on your memory loss by about 10 years and improves your everyday life. We know that it improves health-related quality of life measures for up to five years after training. We know it cuts the risk of crashing your car in half. We know that it staves off depression in older people. We even know that people who train have significantly lower medical expenditures for up to 5 years post-training. We don’t know this anecdotally–although we can show you plenty of people who can tell you how it changed their life–we know it because of the dozens of controlled, randomized, rigorous scientific studies that have been conducted and published on our products.
In aging, we need everything in our arsenal: the physical fitness, the diet, the friends and family, the shower bar, and unequivocally–the brain training. So go ahead, put in brighter bulbs and turn the hearing aid up to full volume–but do know that there is much more you can do to take action and have control over your journey into older age.
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Just as physical exercise boosts our well being and ensures that we always remain in the best shape, mental exercises have the similar effect on our brain. Brain training games can help us to condition our mind and train it to reckon in a focused manner. Moreover these games also provide a very excellent option for utilizing our time constructively.
Computer generated brain training games are becoming increasingly well loved and a rough estimate provides that the amount spent by the consumers in the US every year on computer generated games amounts to roughly $80 million and is bound to increase over the years. The simplicity and effectiveness of these games is what is making them highly well loved. Brain training games help an individual to enhance his cognitive and behavioral capabilities. Thus it enables an individual to improve his memory and also become more attentive.
Memory has a very huge role to play in our day to day activities and a excellent memory surely helps us to excel at our work. The way our brains process information, stores it in our memory and retrieves it is surely nature’s miracle!The entire process of information processing can be divided into three steps viz encoding, storage and recall. Encoding involves how are brain receives and processes data, storage involves how we permanently record this data while recall is the process by which we retrieve data.
The above three steps work in tandem to make a harmony which makes our brain functional and provides us with a excellent memory. Till now we talked about the functioning of the brain and how it process data. Delving a small deeper in these details highlights basically three types of memory that we actively use ie working memory, face name memory and spatial memory. The working memory enables us to remember vital details like phone numbers etc and can be boosted by working memory brain training games which boost this particular cognitive skills.
The face name memory, on the other hand, helps us in recognizing pictures and associating them with names. Brain games are being utilized to strengthen this aspect of the memory for better customer relationship in retail segments. Brain training software is also useful in enhancing the spatial memory which helps us to navigate from one place to another.