It’s bad enough to decline physically.  Even worse is mental decline. The idea of losing cognitive power frightens everyone.  It’s especially frightening if you’ve witnessed anyone descend into the abyss of Alzheimer’s.   Our ability to think makes us human.  Our memories are the record of our life.  When dementia robs a person of these, they’ve lost something truly precious.

Take the case of Edith, one of my elderly patients.  She had a shuffling gait and a vacant gaze.  Because of her live-in caregiver, she was neatly dressed and groomed.  As she sat, she looked at the woman next to her, her daughter, and asked: “Where’s Kate?  Do you know where Kate is?”  “I’m here Mom.  I’m Kate.”  “No you’re not, my Kate is a little girl.  Where’s Kate?”

Sadly, I’ve seen too many people like Edith.  Fortunately, it doesn’t have to happen.   You can stay mentally clear and crisp well into old age. You know this to be true – you’ve seen it.   I’m sure at some point you’ve met a person with plenty of years who was still sharp as anything.  Aren’t those people a delight?  Don’t they exude life?

It’s possible to grow old and age minimally.  But it doesn’t happen by accident.  Habitual choices carry long term consequences.  Research gives us some pretty strong suggestions on how to stay sharp as we grow old.

Here’s a quick run down of some ways to maintain your mental edge over time.  You’ll see some familiar recommendations.  A healthy lifestyle benefits all of you, including your brain.

Exercise

People who are active are at lower risk for mental decline.  Some studies even show improved mental function in elderly people who start a walking program after years of being sedentary.

Obviously, there are a lot of other reasons you should exercise.  Maintaining your wits just emphasizes the importance of an exercise program.  You can read about several effective, efficient exercise programs in Total Health Breakthroughs.  Pick one and stay with it.

Diet

Eat a healthy diet, especially one high in fruits and vegetables.  The antioxidants and micronutrients they contain go a long way toward protecting brain function.  Researchers are looking at the effects of many different foods.  Here are some of the findings.

Fats
The type of fat in your diet affects brain function.  Omega three fatty acids are an important component in all neural tissue. A diet high in omega 3 fatty acids leads to lower levels of inflammation and improved brain function.  Fish are a good source of these types of fats.  Unfortunately, in today’s world you need to be concerned that contaminants such as heavy metals and PCBs taint fish. Even so, I still eat salmon at least once a week and take fish oil supplements daily.

Other fats affect brain function as well.  It turns out that fats that help your heart also help your brain.   Researchers in Italy examined people several times over an eight year period.  Those who ate less saturated fat and more monosaturated fats (like olive oil) showed significantly better cognitive function at the end of the study.a  In other words, the Mediterranean diet helps your brain and your heart.

Curry
India has a low incidence of dementia.  The obvious question is why.  The answer may be in the diet.  A study from the National University of Singapore documented a much lower rate of dementia in people who ate curry regularly as opposed to those who ate it rarely.

One reason curries may be helpful is that they often contain turmeric. Turmeric has high levels of curcumin, which has significant anti-inflammatory action.  It’s actually been shown to reverse plaque formation in animal models of Alzheimers. 

Other spices in curries, such as ginger, cinnamon and garlic, have health benefits as well.  All in all, it’s a reason to develop a taste for Indian food.

Blueberries
Blueberries contain some of the highest levels of antioxidants of any fruit.   In animal studies, adding blueberries to the diet protects against brain aging and the impairment in learning ability and memory that goes with it. 

Green Tea
A study from Japan has shown that people who drink two cups of green tea a day had a 50% lower risk of dementia compared to those who drank less than 3 cups a week.  Black tea and coffee failed to show this benefit.  

Stress
Stress raises levels of hormones that inhibit brain function and actually damage brain cells.  Therefore it’s important to learn techniques to deal with stress that defuse this risk.  Practices such as meditation, guided imagery and especially HeartMath all help in this area

Mental training
Physical exercise is good for you, and so is mental exercise.  The brain is remarkably “plastic” even into old age.  This means that new connections can be formed between brain cells at any age.  You can stimulate this type of growth by doing new things.

Dr. Willis and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania showed that cognitive training improved function and that the improvement persisted over the five years of the study. 

Learning a foreign language, working on challenging puzzles, reading fascinating books all stimulate cognitive development.  Not to mention the fact that they make life more enjoyable.
said that, consider these supplements to give yourself an extra edge.
Supplements.  

I believe your diet should be your main source of nutrients.  Having Fish oil
 As I mentioned, omega three fatty acids are critical for brain function.  They suppress inflammation, which is partly responsive for deterioration of the brain as well as a lot of other problems.  There are several good reasons to supplement with fish oil, and helping your brain is one of them.

Ginko Bilboa
This herb has had a lot of publicity as a memory aid.  It seems to work by improving blood flow.  Most studies have shown moderate effectiveness and it has a good safety profile.

Curcumin
If you can’t develop a taste for curries (my recommendation), curcumin is available as a supplement. 

Alpha Lipoic Acid and Acetyl L Carnitine
Alpha lipoic acid is a powerful antioxidant.  Acetyl L carnitine protects the mitrocondria (the energy producing “powerhouses” of the cells) from age related damage.  Together, they protect the brain.

Phosphatidylserine
Another supplement that has generated a lot of interest is phosphatidylserine.  Acetylcholine is an important neurotransmitter that is reduced in Altzheimers and other forms of dementia. Phosphatidylserine is a precursor of acetylcholine.  Taking it as a supplement improves acetylcholine levels and has shown benefit in both animal and human studies.

Do you think you might be able to develop a taste for green tea?  And would it be possible to keep some blueberries to your diet?  Small changes can have large benefits.

I’ve given you many suggestions to consider.  As you can see, there’s a lot you can do to stay sharp as you age.   Following these suggestions will do more than just help your brain.  You’ll improve your overall levels of vitality while reducing your risk of disease. 

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A few days ago, I described the four stages of learning.  In that post, I used a child learning to tie their shoelaces as an example of the process.

Since I wrote that, it’s occurred to me that there’s another point to be made using that example. It’s at least as important as the knowledge of the four stages.  Realizing this will both speed your progress and increase your joy as you achieve unconscious competence.

Consider again the example of a child learning to tie their shoes.  The child is awkward and fumbling and slow and fails many times as they try. 

Now consider the adult sitting next to them, coaching them as they try to learn.

Most adults patiently go over the steps one by one.  They watch the child practice, pointing out where they can improve and heaping praise on them when they make progress.  The child focuses on the task and takes pride in their progress.

How would the child react to harsh criticism?  How would they feel if the adult expressed disgust at their clumsiness?  Do you think that helps the child progress faster?

That style of coaching doesn’t help.  In fact, it slows learning and robs it of joy.

Yet that critical style is exactly the inner talk many of us use on ourselves as we acquire a new skill.  We expect instant mastery.  When we don’t provide, it we criticize ourselves harshly.  That doesn’t help us any more than it helps the child.

Another point to consider:  When we teach a child to tie their shoes, do we ever doubt that they’ll learn how?  Of course not.  We know they’ll learn.  It may take one child a little longer and a little more practice than another, but we know all children will learn to tie their shoes. 

Think of all the other very complex skills we just assume children will learn, like walking and talking.  We know it may take one child longer than another. We expect there will be differences in learning style.  But we always assume the final result will be mastery.

Children learn at their own pace and in their own style.  My son took a while to start talking.  When he did it was in complete sentences. 

We support our children as they learn and never doubt their eventual success. 

How many hundreds of times does an infant fall as he learns to walk?  Do we give him a certain number of tries and if he doesn’t master it by then tell him to give up?

No we don’t – we assume his eventual success and encourage them to continue trying. We encourage him no matter how many times he “fails”.

And when do we offer the child praise?  Do we wait until they walk absolutely perfectly to tell them they’re doing well?  Or do we praise every small improvement?

The answer’s obvious.  Parents enthusiastically encourage their child to take their first tentative, wobbly step.  When they do, even if the child immediately falls, the parents go wild with praise and encouragement.

How differently we treat ourselves.

So as you learn any new skill, coach and evaluate yourself in a way that serves you.  Use the same degree of patience and appreciation and acceptance with yourself that you would if you were coaching a young person you very much cared for.

After all, praise and appreciation are really the only appropriate responses to someone continually working to learn and grow and acquire new skills.  Even if you aren’t perfect yet, appreciate your involvement in the process of learning.  Mastery will come all the sooner.

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My son is doing very well in an intermediate calculus course at a very challenging university.  Now, I knew a bit of calculus myself “back in the day”.  I majored in physics as an undergrad and upper level physics uses a lot of advanced calculus.  I liked it and did pretty well at it.  In fact, I was an instructor for my university’s introductory calculus class after I graduated.

So I thought it might be interesting to see what questions my son had on his calculus midterm and I asked him to send me some to look at.  Well, it was interesting, but not in the way I had hoped.  I knew zip.  It was as if I had never known any of it.

That really isn’t surprising.  We all know we forget what we don’t use.  If we want to stay competent with a body of information, we need to use. 

Here’s a routine that only takes a few minutes to raise your retention from 20% to over 80% in the long term.

The key is review.  If we emerge from a period of learning, say a 45 minute lecture, with a solid grasp of the information and do nothing with it, our retention at 6 months will be miniscule.However, short periods of review, totaling maybe 30 to 45 minutes over that six months can raise our retention rate to over 80%.

Without going into learning theory and theories of the interaction between short term and long term memory (if such things exist), actively attempting to recall and interact with data makes it more readily accessible.  There’s a theory that claims that once you’ve learned, or even simply experienced something, you always have the memory of it, it’s just a matter of being able to access it.  In this theory,  I still know calculus; I’ve just forgotten how to remember it.  

To dramatically raise your retention of information, try this type of review.  After the learning period, look the material over and pick out the highlights and the main points then actively attempt to recall them, checking your notes or text or whatever if need be. Do this either immediately or a little later in the day. 

Then do the same thing the next day.  Then in a week.  And again in a  month.

Feel free to repeat the review even more often, but even this little bit will make the information much more accessible.  If you’ve taken notes, you’ll find that phases in the notes trigger recall of more complex information.

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If you have not heard of the term mind mapping yet, now is a good time to learn about it. You will certainly be missing out on a lot of things if you are still using the old
‘listing’ technique or taking down notes when studying, mapping out a plan or drafting an outline for a project at school or at work.

Not only does mind mapping eliminate the need for tedious lists, but it also works the same way that the human brain works, so coming up with a mind map or concept map is a breeze for anybody who wants to try it out.

So how does mind mapping work? This technique involves the illustration of ideas on paper. Think of it as literally drawing a ‘map’ of what you are actually thinking.

First, what you need to do is write in the center of the paper a word which represents the main theme or central idea. From that one word, you can think of other words associated with this central idea which can be connected to the main word with the use of branches. A branch from the main theme could have a sub-branch which is another word associated with the keyword, and so on – let the process evolve from there.

Once the entire paper is filled out with your ideas, the entire illustration will merge into a whole, which you can easily remember, picture in your mind and understand.

Now that you have a basic idea of what mind mapping is, take a look at the numerous benefits of mind mapping:

• You can save a lot of time and effort when using the mind mapping technique, instead of the traditional ‘listing’ method.
If you are fond of using itemized lists when taking down notes from a lecture, or even planning a vacation trip – imagine the amount of time and effort that you will save if you will use mind mapping instead. With mind mapping, you can eliminate the unnecessary details and just concentrate on what is important to you.

• Mind maps are easier to understand and remember.
This is especially applicable for students who are studying for an exam. Use mind mapping during a lecture, and you will find that the illustration will help you remember facts better, rather than relying on the traditional notes. This is because it will be easier for you to imagine an illustration rather than memorize a bunch of lists about the topic discussed.

With mind mapping, you can use your brain to its utmost potential and enjoy the advantages of having a better time at planning, organizing your thoughts, remembering facts and analyzing data – skills that you can apply both at work and in your home life.
 

 

 

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