Fitness Programs
The Brain Fitness Solution
What is the brain fitness program? I'm glad that you asked. Recently, there have been a lot of new stories about the plasticity of our brains. All that really means is that we have the ability to keep improving our intelligence, our memory and our mental clarity for as long as we live.
That was a subject of some debate, for many years. You would hear sayings like, "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." Well, maybe not a dog, but higher thinking mammals, such as we humans, can continue to learn throughout our lives.
We owe a debt of gratitude to physicians and neuropsychologists who work with people who have injured their brains in some manner. Stroke victims, for example, have to "re-learn" many things. We continue to learn exactly how our brains work, because of these learned professionals.
Now, the brain fitness program is a documentary that aired on PBS in December, 2007. It has recently been released on DVD. But, don't expect too much from it. It is primarily an interesting overview of the latest research.
As with any other health subject, there are no "miracles" here. To increase or protect your mental clarity takes work. There is no single exercise that will work for everyone. There are actually a number of different steps that should be included.
You should actually design the brain fitness program that is right for you. It should include physical exercises, because physical activity increases the number of new neurons that our brains create.
It should include mental exercise, because that determines how those neurons will be used and how long they will survive. Your programs should also include stress management. A brain under stress produces less new neurons and their lifespan is shorter.
All of this has been confirmed with clinical research and laboratory studies. We have the ability to "see" the synapses firing or "misfiring", in the case of someone with a mental illness. We can tell which lobe is being accessed and have learned how to stimulate the different areas of our brains.
Everyone has different needs. For example, if you want to improve your memory, the brain fitness program that you choose should focus on that subject.
If the claims made by a game or software program are vague and general, choose something else. There are plenty of programs on the market. Even Nintendo makes a video game to stimulate the brain.
The experts recommend that video games and computer based learning programs are more effective than those on paper, like Sudoku and crosswords. Those kinds of exercises do not provide increasingly difficult challenges.
Anything that you do can improve your mental clarity. Some things just seem to be more effective than others. Mind-fit, for example, is a software program that combines a personalized training regimen with a dozen new skills to learn and a regular assessment of your progress.
This was a very brief overview of the subject, but hopefully you learned a little more about the brain fitness program. Good luck with your endeavors.
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