Keeping a Healthy and Youthful Brain
by
Peter Moulton, Ph.D.
Keeping a Healthy and Youthful Brain by Peter Moulton, Ph.D. |
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Brain Agility Exercises
Brain Agility provides a unique integrated and balanced 30-day program of 20 to 30 minutes of daily mental exercise. The different types of exercises have been designed to call upon corresponding cognitive functions in order to stimulate the brain structures underlying these functions. Because mental exercise is so important, 180 of the 280 pages of the book are devoted to exercises. In addition to daily memory and naming exercises, there are nine other categories of exercises that challenge visual, verbal, numerical, and logical functioning. For variety, only six of the nine are presented for a given day. The variety gives freshness to the daily mental exercise and maintains interest. Following are brief descriptions of each category of exercise. The book provides more detailed descriptions together with suggestions for strategies for solving the exercises. Shopping List, To-Do List, Fact of the Day Each day a Shopping List or To-Do List and a Fact of the Day are to be remembered. One is then asked to recall the information immediately following presentation and at the end of the exercises for the day. This challenges both immediate and delayed memory. Sequences A Sequence exercise presents five elements of a sequence and challenges one to find the next element. This activity exercises short term and working memory, abilities to recognize similarities and differences among the elements and abilities to form and test hypotheses. All of these are important in everyday problem solving. Word Chains A Word Chain exercise challenges verbal fluency, word recognition, and working memory. Verbal fluency is especially important in "finding the word" in everyday life. These exercises require finding a sequence of words leading from a starting word to a target word. Each word in the sequence is obtained by changing one letter of the previous word. The number of blank lines between the start and the target indicate the number of words to be found in the sequence from the start to the target. Rotations A Rotations exercise challenges visual working memory, visual acuity and the ability to mentally manipulate images. This ability is important when trying to make sense of visual information that may be presented in a new manner such as when driving or going down the aisles of a supermarket. Each exercise requies determining which images can be derived from a given image by simply rotating the image around its center without "reflecting" it (as it would appear when holding it up to a mirror). Another way of understanding a reflection is to imagine flipping the image over like a pancake. These exercises require selecting which images at the right of a line are rotations of the image at the left of the line. Calculations A Calculations exercise challenges arithmetic abilities as well as concentration and attention. Working as quickly as possible and avoiding writing carries and borrows on the paper gives short term memory and working memory extra exercise. Finding Words This is for the Scrabble fans! Finding words that can be spelled from the letters of a given word is good exercise for word fluency and processing speed. Time is limited to three minutes. Symbol Counting Counting symbols arranged in a random field gives important exercise for visual discrimination in the presence of distracters. This is something everyone driving a car into an intersection must be able to do very quickly! While it is possible to increase accuracy by running a finger across the page, avoiding this and visually scanning a larger field of view brings greater benefit. Naming Naming exercises require finding names of a particular class, such as flowers. This can help finding that word on the tip of the tongue. Thinking of categories of items and then filling in the details may be useful. For example, when naming animals, one might think of pets, farm animals, wild animals, etc. and then fill in "cat", "dog", "cow", "horse", "lion", "elephant", etc. Doing this makes use of associations in semantic memory. Word Matrix The Word Matrix exercise challenges visual perception and working memory and requires the brain to filter out distractions. One is asked to find the numbered words within the letters of the matrix. The words within the matrix can be spelled backwards or forwards, up or down, and diagonally. Coding A Coding exercise challenges visual perception and short term memory. These exercises require decoding a quote encoded in visual figures or icons by locating these figures in a table. The more icon-letter associations one can remember, the faster one's processing speed will be. Schedules A Schedule exercise involves working with airline schedules to calculate time differences between cities and the length of flights -- a real world problem that challenges arithmetic abilities, working memory, concentration, and logical abilities. Because this is the most complex of the exercises, the book provides a more detailed explanation of strategies for solving it than is given for the other exercises. The schedule for each exercise is divided into two parts: an airline schedule on the left and a table of cities, airport codes and time zones on the right. The airline schedule gives origin, destination, departure time, arrival time, and flight number for multi-legged flights. Solutions to the Exercises are given at the end of the book.
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