Exercise For the Aging Brain

Use it or lose it; a fair body of evidence stands in support of the modest improvements to be gained by exercising brain and body. From the Washington Post: "Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people ... honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body. ... the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle ... the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later." Every little bit extra gets you closer to an age of real rejuvenation technologies.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121901431.html

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