Build Your Brain

You have probably heard of aerobics, walking, running, and swimming to build endurance and anaerobic weight training to build muscle. Now there is neurobics, brain exercises that flex the brains muscles!

PET and MRI show that activity of the brain increases with unfamiliar tasks. Routine tasks cause little excitement as the brain's road and communications are well-equipped to take on this routine activity. A new challenge means bringing in new cells and roads to handle the work load and increase brain size. For example, you injury your right hand and now need to write with your left. Well some baby boomers, like me, never learned to type as their mother typed all their term papers. Of course, this could not last forever and I had to learn to type for myself. Practice makes perfect, though if I had begun this process at fourteen instead of fifty-four, or like learning a language at four instead of fifty-four, I would have learned twenty times faster. That is mental agility. That begins to fade at twenty-four. But, my capacity is still there. It just takes longer to do everything else as you age, except forgetting that is.

Novelty

The Secret to FORT-Neurobics is novelty, reception and expression. In other words, find a new task or activity, learn how to do the task and then put into practice the activity.

What occurs in my brain with the introduction of a novel way of writing is a different part of my brain is stimulated, superior and lateral to the handwriting area. In fact, handwriting barely lights up showing it is no challenge to my brain, that part is well developed and can handle it. My pathways are abundant and need not be increased in size or old connections and cells have to handle the burden. Important lesson, just because you are doing a lot of routine activity does not mean an increased brain size or capacity. It just maintains what you have had. What we need as we age is to invest in new areas to bare new dividends.

So when I type my motor sensory and memory areas are challenged. Our society is both very visual and auditory so these connections are well-developed. However, smell, taste, touch and emotional senses are neglected. These areas are in the parietal lobe and temporal area and often are unused and rarely challenged. Thus, when activated "adaptive qualities" are built into our electrical brain that pump out tropic factors that signal, "bring on new recruits, the new brain cells and connections." Use sign language, read Braille, smell your food and identify tastes to activate stretch your brain and activate new areas.

Train these connections, mature them, for the function needed! Open up and widen new bridges. Soon a new city is blooming and the payoff is increased ability. This increase in ability is the key to preventing Alzheimer's disease.

I went from six words per minute to an astounding thirty words a minute, from twelve errors per minute to six at five times the speed. Is there just no limit to my capacity? Many are snickering now, knowing that they type a hundred words a minute with fewer errors. However, at my age I am building brain capacity where I had little to none. That is the essence of neurobics. Making it fun and a challenge is neurobicizing. No, you cannot find that word in the dictionary, my new brain just made it up!

Learn Neurobic brain growing! "The Anti-Alzheimer's Prescription" and the DEAR program offer a guide to preventing Alzheimer's disease through diet, exercise, mental agility tasks and prayer and meditation. For more helpful information about this program please visit www.DEARprogram.com. or Anti-alzheimer's.com

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The Fortanasce Neurology Center is dedicated to providing quality patient care with unrelenting attention to clinical excellence, promoting wellness and an unparalleled compassion and commitment to assure the very best healthcare to all those in need with disorders of the Nervous System.