Entertain the Brain To Keep It Interested In Life

By Suzanne Holman • April 13th, 2010

Even with “normal” aging our short term memory can weaken.
Whether you are experiencing normal aging memory reduction or you are having symptoms of Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, finding ways to amuse your brain can be advantageous for its vitality.

Our brains love variety and novelty and respond well to stimulation such as crossword puzzles, sudoku, and the variety of “brain games” available online and in software created for many of our electronics.

These programs are designed for a number of different purposes.

One problem with aging brains is a slowing of reaction time. Practice with programs
that provide you with drills to act quickly and accurately can work with those brain cells that may have gotten sluggish. Some are designed to develop response inhibition to avoid errors in a quick reaction that may not be correct. I’ve found these to be quite challenging and have seen quite a lot of progress as I’ve taken the time to work on several exercises a day.

My brain is enjoying the stimulation of multiple math problems thrown at me to answer in quick fire response. I’m pleased to see that I do really well on these.

Some that are more challenging for me are spatial logic drills. I am improving but do find these to be less fun!

Others work to improve your memory of faces, numbers, shapes, colors, etc.
Visual field is tested and tweaked in an exercise that is part of a site called www.lumosity.com.

Speed spelling, definitions, and unscrambling of words is part of the Word Coach program for Nintendo DS.
Other Nintendo programs are Brain Challenge and Brain Age that offer a variety of exercises for focus, memory, vision, math, and logic. They also include opportunities to perform the exercises with added stressful distractions to see how well you can focus and ignore those annoyances.

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Comments(1) Brain, memory

Comments

By Cathy Jantzen on April 14th, 2010 at 3:29 pm

Hey Suzanne, you are so right about keeping the brain stimulated. I’ve been playing lumosity games for a while. I see progress. And, it’s not in the math area. Every category but there. I’ll keep exercising though.