Staying Sharp For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934504
ISBN: 978-1-119-18779-0 (pbk); 978-1-119-18781-3 (ebk); 978-1-119-18780-6 (ebk)
Welcome to Staying Sharp For Dummies!
Your brain plays a major role in almost everything you do, including thinking, feeling, communicating, breathing, remembering, working, playing, sleeping, and countless other activities. Maintaining and improving your brain’s health is vital to your quality of life — a fact that becomes even truer as you get older. Staying Sharp For Dummies focuses on understanding how to maximize your brain power within the context of your overall health. The book aims to provide you with information, tools, resources, and tangible steps to keep a healthy, active mind. The good news is that you can do a lot to keep your brain sharp throughout your life.
This book weaves together up-to-date information from a range of For Dummies titles into a fresh take on helping keep your body and your brain working better and longer. You’ll find a wealth of tips and ideas not only for improving your memory and reasoning but also for practicing mindfulness, relaxing, eating right, exercising, and heading off common health problems as you get older.
Because this is a For Dummies book, the chapters are written and arranged so you can pick and choose whichever topics interest you most and dive right in. You don’t need to read the chapters in sequential order, although you certainly can if you like — the topics are organized to provide a rich experience should you just plow through starting at Chapter 1.
This book makes some assumptions about you, the reader. Hopefully, one of the following descriptions fits you:
This book doesn’t assume any particularly advanced knowledge of medicine or physiology (or any other ology, for that matter). All you need is a desire to investigate how your brain and body can work together as beneficially as possible. When followed properly, much of the advice herein could add years to your life — not to mention sparking interest, spurring action, strengthening, and even calming your soul. Not a bad deal.
Throughout the book, several icons designed to point out specific kinds of information. Keep an eye out for them:
A Tip points out especially helpful or practical information about a topic. It may be hard-won advice on the best way to do something or a useful insight that may not be obvious at first glance.
A Warning highlights potential problems or trouble you may encounter and mistaken assumptions that can lead to difficulties.
Technical Stuff points out nonessential stuff that may be interesting if you’re really curious about something. You can safely skip these bits if you’re in a hurry or just looking for the basics.
Remember indicates stuff that you’ll do well to stash somewhere in your memory for future benefit.
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product also comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that provides tips on keeping your brain sharp through exercise, nutrition, reducing stress, and so on. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Staying Sharp For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
You can approach this book from several different angles. You can start with Chapter 1 and read straight through to the end. But you may not have time for that, or maybe you feel like exploring, say, meditation or improving your diet or lowering your blood pressure. Try checking out the table of contents to see a map of what’s covered in the book and then flip to any particular chapter that catches your eye. Or if you’ve got a specific issue or topic you’re burning to know more about, try looking it up in the index.
When you’re done with the book, you can further your adventures in staying sharp by checking out other titles written by the authors of the original books this material comes from. Check out the “About the Authors” page to see what else these experts have written on topics of interest to you.
Ultimately, the phrase staying sharp should imply long-term commitment to changing some of your habits and making different lifestyle choices. Science has learned a whole lot about how the body and brain work and what you can do to make them work better. This book is an attempt to provide a kind of synthesis of a lot of different areas of study, all converging on this integrated topic. You should aim to do that, too. Part of staying sharp, then, should include maintaining an interest in continuing to stay sharp. Never stop trying to challenge and improve yourself — just that by itself can do wonders. Good luck to you!
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Get an introduction to brain training and discover how keeping your brain alert and active can keep your thinking sharp.
Discover how to enhance your language skills and remember more.
Boost your brain power with music, drawing, and more kinds of creativity.
Focus on visual-spatial memory — learning how your eyes and your brain work together to help you remember names and directions.
Find out how games and training help your brain stay sharp.
Give your gray matter a workout with lots and lots of examples of real logic puzzles, riddles, cryptograms, and word scrambles.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Finding out about your brain
Sorting through brain facts and legends
Introducing brain training for adults
You want your brain to work at its best, whether you want to stay sharp to keep up with your children or to excel at your work. The exciting thing is that science now provides evidence for what works and what doesn’t. Training your brain no longer has to be a case of trial and error. Staying Sharp For Dummies covers some cutting-edge, scientific research and examines how this research can influence your life and change your brain for the better.
The brain weighs a mere three pounds, yet it’s responsible for the smooth running of your whole body. With 100 billion cells, your brain is like the CEO of a giant corporation. How can something so small have so much responsibility? This chapter provides basic information on how your brain works. This understanding gives you the foundation for knowing how to best train your brain.
Brain training is a growing area of interest, both in research and in the public mind. Exciting emerging evidence indicates that you can train your brain and, as a result, change your circumstances. But what works and what doesn’t? Can everyone benefit from brain training? The final section of this chapter looks at this issue in some detail.
People who use their brains more efficiently tend to have better jobs, better relationships, and more happy and fulfilling lives. Although you may have heard that you’re stuck with the brain you have, scientific research has now found that this isn’t true!
You’re probably familiar with the left brain and the right brain. Well, it’s true that the brain is made up of left and right hemispheres, which do have different functions. However, the idea that some people are only left-brainers and others are only right-brainers isn’t entirely true. For example, language skills are located in the left hemisphere (see Chapter 2), and everyone uses this part of the brain! You don’t need to hide behind the excuse that you’re a right-brainer so you can’t do math calculations. With the activities included in this book, you can get both halves of your brain working at their optimum levels.
The different parts of the brain don’t work in isolation; they work together as a team. When you train one part of the brain, the whole brain benefits. You can think of the brain like an orchestra or a sports team. The message is the same — one star player can’t carry the rest of the team.
Mental health refers to your state of being. Are you happy? When do you find yourself frustrated? Do you feel stressed out? What makes you feel anxious? These questions are important in determining how well your brain functions, so make sure you pay attention to your mental health. Doing so can make the difference between living a fulfilled life or a frustrated one.
Don’t take your passions and hobbies for granted. Discover how they can make your brain more creative. A more creative brain is a smarter brain. Whether you’re a music lover, a budding writer, or a person with any of dozens of other interests, you can choose from a range of activities to help your brain.
Getting swept into myriad things that demand your attention on a daily basis is easy. Yet, in this ever-demanding environment, finding time to quiet your brain and create a space for contemplation is increasingly important. Calm time brings tremendous benefits for your brain. You don’t have to be a nun or a monk spending hours at a time to experience the benefits of contemplation. Scientific research has found that even ten minutes a day makes a big difference in improving how your brain functions.
One great way to train your brain is to keep it socially active. From picking up the phone to meeting for coffee to discussing the latest movie, growing research illustrates that friendships benefit the brain.
It’s not just face-to-face interactions that make a positive impact. Virtual friendships and actively engaging with others via digital technology or interacting within virtual experiences can also boost your brain power. Note that this brain benefit requires active involvement on your part. You don’t get that same cognitive benefit when you’re passively watching a video on a TV or a computer screen.
A healthy lifestyle leads to a more efficient brain — one that can respond better to stress, remember information, and be more attentive. What you eat and drink, what exercise you do, how much sleep you get — all these actions affect your brain. Understanding how your daily decisions in these areas can make a big difference in your brain function is important. So before you take another bite of your sandwich or drink another glass of wine, find out what really is best for your brain.
Here are a few tips and strategies for tailoring your lifestyle to your brain’s advantage:
With the increase of brain training, people throw around many “facts.” The following list covers some of the more common statements about brain training:
Make sure the brain-training programs you use have these key features:
The computer video game Tetris is an old favorite for many people. It requires you to rotate descending colored blocks so that they fit together without gaps rather than pile up. With each level, the blocks’ speed increases to challenge you. Now fans of Tetris can play with impunity — scientific evidence is on your side! Research shows that spatial memory improves after you play Tetris. Some scientists have also observed that physical changes occur in the brain after subjects play Tetris for an extended period — and that these players worked more efficiently in certain tasks. Not a bad result for just rotating some colored blocks on the screen!
In a recent survey, people reported that they preferred to use computerized products than puzzle books. This tendency may explain why brain-training products have skyrocketed in recent years. However, don’t give up on puzzles and board games. Strong evidence indicates that these activities keep your brain active. Even schoolchildren benefit more from playing board games like Scrabble than playing on a computer game. So don’t stop playing word games, doing crosswords, or challenging your spouse to late-night Scrabble; it’s great for your brain. (See Chapter 5 for a lot more about the science of brain games and Chapter 6 for plenty of actual games to try out.)
Understanding of the brain has come a long way since the notion of the four “humors” — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. According to the ancient Greeks and Romans, an imbalance in one of these humors would result in illness and affect both mental and physical health. This dominant view remained firmly in place until the 19th century when modern medical research came on the scene.
Since then, scientists have made great strides in understanding how the brain works, and each day brings exciting new discoveries. In current understanding, the brain is divided into four parts.
When Phineas Gage went to work on the morning of September 13, 1848, the 25-year-old probably had no idea that he was going to be immortalized in medical and psychology history for years to come.
Phineas was a railroad construction foreman who suffered severe head injuries as the result of a blast — a long iron rod was lodged in his head, entering the top of his skull and exiting through his cheek (see Figure 1-1). Remarkably, Phineas survived! He could walk, communicate, and seemed to be aware of his surroundings. However, his personality changed completely. He had great difficulty controlling his anger. After the accident, he transformed from a mild-mannered young man into a violent and hot-tempered individual. People who knew him before his accident said that he was no longer the same Phineas Gage they knew.
PD-US, Public Domain
FIGURE 1-1: The skull of Phineas Gage impaled with the iron rod.
Phineas’s injury provided the medical and psychological professions with great insight into how the brain works. By looking at the trajectory of the iron rod through his head, experts were able to begin to understand the link between different parts of the brain and everyday functioning.
Parts of the frontal lobe are linked to personality. Unfortunately for Phineas, this part of his brain sustained the most damage, resulting in his dramatic change in character. Other sections of the frontal lobe are associated with language and motor skills, which, thankfully for Phineas, remained intact.
Figure 1-2 shows the four major areas of the brain. Each of these lobes has a left and right side. The left and right sides of the brain are called the hemispheres of the brain.
Frontal lobe: As the name suggests, the frontal lobe is located in the front of the brain and makes up the largest part of the brain. A main function of the frontal lobe is to plan and organize incoming information. For example, if you have to plan a party, draw up the guest list, and organize the catering, your frontal lobe is critical in carrying out all these activities.
The frontal lobe is also instrumental in regulating behavior and emotions. This part of the brain, which is associated with a chemical known as dopamine, is sometimes called the brain’s pleasure center because it’s linked to attention, planning, motivation, reward, and enjoyment.
The frontal lobe doesn’t fully develop until people reach their 20s, which may explain why it’s so hard to convince a toddler to stop throwing a tantrum, or get a teenager to consider the long-term consequences of her decisions. Both of these scenarios involve the use of the frontal lobe to plan actions, consider consequences, and then alter actions as necessary.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 1-2: The four major lobes of the brain.
As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the parts of the brain don’t function in isolation; they work together like members of an orchestra. But sometimes all the parts don’t contribute the way they should. In some cases, certain parts underperform, but other parts overperform. One example is exhibited by individuals with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Research on ADHD has established that these people have underactive components in the part of their frontal lobes responsible for planning and controlling behavior but overactive parts of the frontal lobe’s motor cortex, which is necessary for managing motor functions. The combination of underperformance in one area and overperformance in another area results in the hyperactive and impulsive behavior that is characteristic of ADHD.
The prefrontal cortex, located within the frontal lobe, is one of the most crucial parts of the brain. It’s linked with executive function skills, which you use for everyday tasks like decision-making and planning.
For example, say you’re driving down a busy road at rush hour and you’re late for a meeting. You’re alone in the car, but you see the carpool lane traffic is moving much more quickly. Should you switch to that lane so you can get to your meeting on time? You see a police car up ahead has pulled over a speeding car. You’re weighing the choice of staying out of the carpool lane and being late for your meeting versus illegally entering the carpool lane in order to get to your meeting on time but having the chance of getting pulled over. Complex decisions like this one, where you have to plan your actions and weigh the resulting consequences, require your prefrontal cortex to perform executive function.
Here’s another scenario: The phone rings, and it’s someone giving you important information about an event you’re attending. You’re busy writing down all this information when you hear a beep from your computer alerting you that an email has just come in from a friend. You decide to open your email, but as you’re skimming it you get distracted and miss some of the event information over the phone.
Both of these examples illustrate how you use your prefrontal cortex to make decisions daily. You have to keep a goal in mind (reaching your destination or writing down key information), juggle different scenarios (should you go in the carpool lane?) or tasks (should you check your email while on the phone?), and inhibit potentially distracting information to reach your goal (putting the thought of using the carpool lane out of your head; delaying the desire to read your email at that moment).
In addition to the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and amygdala are key players in keeping your brain active and alert.
The name hippocampus comes from the Greek word for “seahorse,” and it’s called such because it looks very much like a seahorse. The hippocampus is located deep in the temporal lobe near the center of the brain.
The hippocampus has two main functions: long-term memory and spatial understanding. (See Chapter 10 for more information on long-term memory.) The brain stores two types of long-term memories in the hippocampus:
The hippocampus also functions like a spatial map that helps with directions and navigation. So if you get lost often while you’re driving, blame your hippocampus!
Damage to the hippocampus can result from Alzheimer’s disease, oxygen deprivation, and epilepsy that affects the temporal lobe, where the hippocampus is located. People who sustain damage to the hippocampus experience difficulties in forming new memories, a condition known as anterograde amnesia. Hippocampus damage can also erode older memories (known as retrograde amnesia). However, if your hippocampus is damaged, you still retain procedural memory — that is, how to do things like walking, talking, or biking or other motor tasks. (See Chapter 12 for more on this topic.) The fact that long-term memories are stored in different parts of the brain can explain why an amnesic patient may not be able to remember important events from her life but may still remember how to play the guitar.
The hippocampus is also linked to mental health. Research into patients with depression has found that the hippocampus is usually smaller (by around 10 to 20 percent) compared with those not suffering from depression. The actual reduction of the hippocampus depends on the frequency of depressive episodes as well as the length of time the depression went untreated. This explains the cognitive deficits that are associated with major depression including declarative memory. Antidepressant medications work to treat the underlying neurochemical imbalances that occur in clinical depression that cause these symptoms.
The name amygdala comes from the Greek word for “almond” due to its physical similarity to that nut. The amygdala is located next to the hippocampus in both sides of the brain. It’s associated with emotional memories — those that make you laugh and those that make you cry or feel afraid. For instance if you ever were bitten by a vicious dog, the amygdala helps you process that event, making you more alert and fearful around dogs.
The amygdala also helps you store information over the long term. If you have an emotional connection to the information you’re trying to learn, you’re more likely to transfer this knowledge to your long-term memory. For example, if you’re trying to learn a new language, you can associate the new words with an emotional memory to help you make those words stick.
The amygdala is linked with higher creative activity (see Chapter 3 for more on boosting your creative skills).