|
Mental Exercise
Studies
show that mental decline as we age is mainly due to brain inactivity and
lack of mental exercise. However, if mental decline is not caused by
disease, then activities such as reading, puzzles, playing games like
chess or computer and video games, as well as other mental exercises, can prevent
mental deterioration. Researchers have discovered that the results of a few days of mental exercise persists
for many years unlike in the case of physical exercises where the
results fade away with time if the person stops going to the gym. Their findings are simple,
the brain has a tremendous capacity
for neuronal growth, and this occurs even as we age, provided that the
brain continues to receive stimulus to grow neurons.
In federally funded research, research teams divided volunteers into
four groups, a, b, c, and d. The first group received no training at
all, the second group was trained on reasoning skills, the third group
in memory skills such as visualization and associations, and memorizing
word drills, and the fourth group in different methods to speed up
their mental processing. Each group was trained on ten sessions each
lasting 60-75 minutes, the difficulty levels of the challenges
progressively increasing with each session. After five years, it has
been observed that the team that had undergone reasoning skills did 40%
better than the untrained group, those who had received memory skills
were better by 75%, and the team that got speed training showed a
whooping 300% increase in their mental performances.
The study
was conducted on 2,802 healthy adults from different backgrounds, the
average age being 73. However, the volunteers were all healthy and in
that sense, the study did not observe the effects of mental exercise on
Alzheimer's patients or those with other brain and neurological
disorders. The comprehensive results and observations made by the study,
with graphs and diagrams, have been published in the December edition of
the Journal of the American Medical
Association.
So, which
mental exercises are the most beneficial for upping your
mental capacity and stimulating neuronal growth? Obviously, watching TV is
not a mental exercise for it is too passive an activity and it in no way
aids mental simulation, but solving puzzles or crosswords, gradually raising the difficulty levels each time you solve one, doing
mental math while driving or traveling, inventing lyrics,
writing stories or poems, arguing philosophy, redesigning things,
drawing, reading, or even
computer programming, if you love programming, are all interesting
activities that are mental exercises as well.
Meditation
is another mental exercise – partly physical as well – that is found to
improve one's mental strength and ability significantly. Studies have
shown that daily activities like yoga and meditation
increases the thickness of the cortex in those brain areas that are
responsible for actions such as sensory processing and attention
(medically, the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula
respectively).
In short,
those areas of the brain that you stimulate through your mental
activities grow more, owing to increased neuronal growth, bigger blood
vessels, growth of supporting structures like astrocytes and glia, and
increased connections and branching. Physical exercise, a balanced and
healthy diet, and refraining from activities such as alcohol and smoking
also play a major part alongside mental exercises in keeping the brain
active and aware.
|
