Originally published September 22 2005
Get your brain into shape
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Older people can help sharpen their memory and mental skills by simply doing a few mental exercises, such as concentrating on their actions and creating a mental picture of given sets of tasks.
Older people who forget names or lose their car keys can easily become sharper and better organized just by doing a few simple mental exercises, researchers have discovered.
Scientists have known for years that as we get older, the brain tends to function less efficiently, and electrical currents connecting different areas of the brain get weaker.
"Our bodies are getting healthier, and we're living much longer, and the biggest threat now to being able to function well and productively when we're older is in the functioning of the brain," Professor Ian Robertson said yesterday.
"Over the past few years, neuroscientists have made the quite revolutionary discovery that at all ages, the brain is plastic or flexible -- that's to say, it's shaped by experience, what we do and how we think."
Prof. Robertson, who was presenting his latest research on aging to the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference in Dublin, has just completed a study involving volunteers over the age of 50 whose brain performance was measured before and after mental training.
"We've found that with mental training we can enhance certain types of function in elderly people by stimulating activity in the frontal lobes of the brain," said Prof Robertson, a 54-year-old neuro-psychologist at Trinity College, Dublin, who has just published a book in Britain entitled Stay Sharp with the Mind Doctor.
"We're all familiar with older people who tell the same story again and again without realizing they've told it before to the same person.
As we get older, we tend not to use our attention system, our ability to concentrate on what's going on around us, because we tend to think we've seen it all before, and we see what we expect to see rather than what's actually there.
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