Feel like you’re losing your marbles? Here’s how to get your grey cells functioning again. You can’t find your glasses (they’re on your head), you forgot the morning staff meeting (it was an hour ago), and the kitchen counter). Of well, when you’re crazy-busy, exhausted, or valiantly multitasking from morning till night, something’s gotta give and it’s usually your memory. Should you worry? Not everyone who complains of frequent memory glitches go on to develop dementia, assures Dr. Shweta Adatia, consultant Neurologist at Lilavati Hospital.
Indeed a little memory loss is perfectly normal once you hit middle age. But if you’re concerned that you “senior” moments are a sign that your grey cells are getting rusty, there’s much you can do to recharge them. ”Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) can be reversed if the problem is addressed early,” says Adatia. And it doesn’t call for any medical treatment, pill or special knowledge. All it involves is “coaxing your brain to be alert and reactive, with the help of exercises called Neurobics.”
SO WHAT IS NEUROBICS? Call it mental aerobics that jog the brain cells in pretty much the same manner as cardiovascular exercise boosts heart health. Neurobics essentially forces your grey cells to work on all cylinders, by doing any routine task in a slightly different manner by recruiting your 5 sense touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision “which puts dormant circuits in your brain to action,” says Adatia.
The idea is not new it’s been around for some time and not everyone agrees it works (see ‘The Sweat Factor’). But its proponents Adatia included claim that neurobics offers dramatic benefits “Pastimes like chess, crossword solving and sudoku are great activities for the bran, but they still don’t give your grey cells the kind of workout that Neurobics would, because they don’t involve all your senses,” avers Adatia, who is in the process of setting up a first-of-its-kind study on Neurobics in India at Lilavati Hospital on a group of healthy 100 men and women with mild cognitive impairment. The subjects are all healthy individuals who have no serious complaints other than chronic forgetfulness.
The beauty of neurobicss that unlike physical activity, you can do them anywhere, anytime at home, in your commute, at your desk, says Adatia. Take your cues from her.
Shake things up: Use your non dominant hand to brush your teeth, write. Shuffle things on your desk so you’re forced to use your non dominant hand to reach for, say, the phone, the mouse. Take a new route to home.
How it works: “By giving your non dominant hand a new task, you challenge the circuits in the dormant half of the brain to work,” says Adatia. Finding directions in a new place jogs the brain to be alert to visual cues, stimulates nerve cell growth in the brain.
Take a shower with your eyes hurt: Locate the tap, feel the mug and touch water with your eyes closed. Identify a new bar of soap by its fragrance before you apply it.
How it works: Performing a routine task without the help of visual stimulation forces the brain to recruit the other senses (touch, smell) to do the activity.
Play guessing games at the dinner table: Have your family members join you in this. Try to identify a covered dish by its aroma. Taste a brand new dish and guess its ingredients.
How it works: It’s easy to name the ingredients in a dish by looking at it, but when you try to identify them only by smell, a wholly different set of neural circuits are brought into play.
Wake up to a new aroma: If your mornings always start with the smell of fresh coffee, ask your partner to place some fragrant flowers at your bedside table instead.
How it works: By trying to recognize a new scent, the brain is alerted to a different stimuli to start the day, which works your noggin more effectively than the caffeine in your coffee.
Toss a salad blindfolded: Keep all the ingredients ready before you start assembling the dish. Then put on a blindfold and try to recognize each item by touch and smell. Try to add the correct amount of salt and pepper, toss and then taste to find out how accurate was your experiment.
How is works: You’re putting your brain on high alert in the effort to identify ingredients by their smell. The exercise also enhances your ability to judge things better by using your abstract sense to measure the ingredients. And lastly, the effort required to locate the carrot sticks vis-a-vis the French beans boosts your visual spatial memory.
Identify some unusual sounds: This game puts your memory associated with hearing to test. Do it alone or with your family, friends or colleagues. Record the chirping of birds, at a zoon and play it back at home. Try to identify each bird by its twitter. Or name the various musical instruments in a CD.
How it works: Puts to use the aural circuits of the brain that helps you identify sounds.
Shun monotony: Socialize, take up a new hobby like cooking or dancing, read a new book. Learn a new language, be it Swahili or Konkani. There’s no need to get fluent; just drill vocal with an instruction CD in the car.
How it works: Stretch your mind, and you can create new pathways in the brain. The new pathways can help you stay on top of everything you’ve already got simmering.
THE SWEAT FACTOR Not all scientists agree that any single brain exercise program be it chess, Sudoku or neurobics can act as a quick fix for general mental function. “Such a belief is almost entirely faith based,” write Snadra Aamodt, editor in chief of neuroscience at Princeton University. And
Sam Wang, an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. The duo go on to add that “most of us get plenty of everyday stimulation in activities like finding a new address, socializing with friends or nagivating the treacherous currents of office politics. For people whose work is unstimulating, having mentally challenging hobbies, like learning a new language or playing bridge, can help maintain cognitive performance. But the one form of training that has been conclusively shown to maintain and improve brain health is physical exercise.”
In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party. Executive function starts to decline when people reach their 70s. But elderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age. This relationship might occur because people who are healthier tend to be more active, but that’s not the whole story. When inactive people get more exercise, even starting in their 70s, their executive function improves, as shown in a recent meta-analysis of 18 studies.
Exercise is also strongly associated with a reduced risk of dementia late in life. People who exercise regularly in middle age are one-third as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease in their 70s as those who did not exercise. Even people who begin exercising in their 60s have their risk reduced by half.
How might exercise help the brain? In people, fitness training slows the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex, which is important for executive function. In rodents, exercise increases the number of capillaries in the brain, which should improve blood flow, and therefore the availability of energy, to neurons. Exercise may also help the brain by improving cardiovascular health, preventing heart attacks and strokes that can cause brain damage. Finally, exercise causes the release of growth factors, proteins that increase the number of connections between neurons, and the birth of neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region important for memory. Any of these effects might improve cognitive performance, though it’s not known which ones are most important.
Researchers haven’t figured out what form of exercise best fits the bill yet, but right now they believe any aerobic workout or an intensive strength training regimen is great. Both get oxygen flowing to the brain. For starters, try walking briskly for 30 to 60 minutes several times a week.
Make Your Brain Fitter In Six (Sort Of) Easy Steps You don’t have to read Nietzsche in the original German to keep your brain sharp. The best activities ate those that start simple and get increasingly challenging, engaging senses at once. Dancing can’t cure Alzheimer’s, but it might delay its onset.
1 Languages Learning to speak a foreign tongue calls for careful listening that sharpens your brain functions.
2 Juggling Tossing pins or balls in the air improves motor control, leading to more legible handwriting.
3 Dancing Do the tango. A recent study showed the sultry step can improve memory, balance and posture.
4 Puzzles Complex jigsaw puzzles force the mind to focus.
5 Ping Pong Table tennis requires refined movement that challenges the brain.
A Well-Tuned Mind The brain’s gray matter, or cerebral cortex, embodies reasoning, vision, hearing and memory. Brain plasticity experts believe that sensory training can sharpen neural connections in the cortex.
Before In what some doctors call “noisy” brains, neural connections slow down and weaken. Memory gets fuzzy, and it becomes harder to hear.
After Continually tasking the brain makes its synapses stronger and improves cognitive performance. These changes can be observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging tests.
