21st century Mantra of having the robust Mental Health?

Secreat  is out:Repeat in your life too,


21st century Mantra of having the robust Mental Health

Our brain and Memory has only one mantra: You can either "Use it or lose it"

The biggest challenge as you mature in age is how to keep engaging your brain in challenging mental activities .The metabolism slows down , the body matures ,your thinking process ( your Brain) to0 slow down . Only the  vigorous activities like physical games/exercise involving repetitions ,playing board games ,computer games  ,games like chase,solving puzzles which will involve new pathways  etc. slows down brain-ageing, keeps the brain young & prevents Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia.

 Experimental evidence:  Rats in the captivity  given  toys to play with showed that they had more synaptic neuronal connections compared to those rats that were deprived of such stimulation.

Applied research:Brain exercises such as computer games, crossword puzzles, chess, learning music or a foreign language and memory exercises have been used to facilitate recovery from brain damage caused by head injury, stroke, diabetes, infarct and chronic schizophrenia.Even persons who were paralysed  were able to recover with brain-stimulating exercises which proves that Mental exercises can heal a sick 

brain.

Example:Scientist and mathematician John Nash(famous for his “Game theory and Nobel prize winner in Economics),  is a striking example who was seriously mentally ill, afflicted with schizophrenia for more than a decade.  He  attributed his recovery to brain exercises like chess and computer games and calls this strategy ‘cognitive therapy’.

 The silver population( Senior/ retired ) who carry on working in the same or similar profession till 75 years of age ,so  doing same jobs  doesn’t help the brain because they are only exercising the pre-existing old neuronal circuitry.Old memories have had the advantage of repeated mental practice or recall . They are the last to fade away in dementia and Alzheimer’s. They are also stored in locations distinctly different from recent memory. It’s during learning to do new activities  , new neuronal connections are formed in the brain.

What is the secrete  of some people remain active / look  young  in old age ?

It is not a magic but effect of neurogenesis. It is not a 'rocket science. You too can look young .Just start trying to change a carrier in middle age or learning a new language .since it involves learning afresh like an infant, without the advantage of prior experience at the task. As our brain has to be in full focus on the task. This is hard work compared to the brain work required for practicing the old skill. More neurochemicals acetylcholine and dopamine are released. On such occasions, our brain is becoming younger, generating new neurons. Learn to change the brain. Because , once dead, same brain cells cannot be brought back to life. However, new brain cells can be formed. This is neurogenesis. And that happens when we learn a new skill. When we are in the process of picking up a new skill, new nerve cells are generated in the hippocampus. And depending upon what brain region is engaged in learning the new task, these young nerve cells migrate to the engaged brain region and start to function in their new location. It’s in the hippocampus that new mental associations, new learning occurs before it’s shifted to higher brain regions for permanent storage. If you can’t practice a new skill physically, just imagine yourself doing it. Scientists had one group of persons practice a skill for a week and saw the improvement not only in their performance, but also in the brain map of the responding brain region. But this was expected. However, what was unexpected was that the second group that ‘practised’ the same skill in their minds, too showed improvements in brain functions and map. Admittedly, the changes in the ‘mental only’ group were weaker than in the first group but the point is that they had both structural brain change and also improvement in their functional use of the skill.

The brain is not a rigid structure but is easily changeable. Changes in the level of mental stimulation alter neural circuitry and consequently, the physical architecture of our brain, keeping it young. So keep it engaged! Use the mental tools to keep it sharp

Chess: Anatoly Sharansky, the famous Soviet human rights

Activist of the late 1970s was imprisoned for his alleged spying

against the then-Soviet Union. He was imprisoned for

nine years, During his prison term, Sharansky kept his brain in

good shape by playing mental chess. He used to plan from

both perspectives—his and opponent’s ,a rare mental effort. Without the mental

work, all his brain maps would degenerate. Several years

later, when world chess champion Gary Kasparov  defeated allother s  but Sharansky.

so be active and  solve Crossword puzzles:

People who are inactive can sometimes get Dementia and Alzaimers disease.. The active seniors mostly engaged in physical exercise and regularly solve crossword puzzles, play board games, read books and newspapers and participate in group discussions.

Learn to play musical Instruments or singing:

 Brain imaging of musicians’ brains shows that many areas of their brains, such as the motor area [because they use fingers] and cerebellum, are larger than those of the non-musicians. Long-time musicians also have thicker fibers connecting the left and right sides of the brain.
New generation has started teaching their young ones piano, guitar, or giving vocal music lessons which shows improvement in mathematical abilities.

You may ask why do I need such information, what do I have too with all this? I don’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s”. It is observed that dementia doesn’t set in abruptly. It comes gradually. Alzheimer’s takes ten or more years before it manifests clinically. But soft signs start over a decade in advance…having one or two from the following list of signs can be due to normal aging but many or all of them occurring often needs interventions like having more vitamins B complex from nutrition or the memory boosting physical and mental exercises.  

• Opening the fridge but forgetting the reasons, “what I needed from fridge?
• Often going to another room in your house but forgetting why you went?
• Forgetting the names of people you used to know?
• Frequently forget where you kept your keys, eye glasses, pen or wallet?
• You need to use gadgets or a pocket diary to remind yourself of important appointments or tasks?
•  Getting lost while talking…you stray away get lost in peripheral conversational details and forget the main argument with which you started?

§   Frequent need to ask the listener “So where was I or on what point we were we talking”?

§   Having the nagging feeling “the name of an object or a person is ‘on the tip of my tongue’ and yet, I can’t recall it exactly?

§  Even in familiar surrounding or hometown, while driving, sudden feeling, for a moment that you are lost?

It is easier to say and deny memory problems by refusing to accept that you have a problem and dismiss the failure to recall recent events or learn new things. It is not wise to declare that we can recall even old events. The misconception here is “the older the memory, the more difficult it is to recall’. But this is misleading. The capacity to learn new things and recall recent events is lost more easily than the memory for old events. In the above two diseases, person may recall the name of his school or his friend’s name from nursery, or kG Classes or mathematical tables but he does not recall the most recent happenings or the names of his current friends, wife, son or daughter etc. It will be too late if we wait for the old memories to switch of completely. As current research demonstrates a significant percentage of patients with a variety of psychiatric disorders, including depression, have a deficiency in several vitamins such as thiamine, pyridoxine, cyanocobalamin, and folic acid. research suggests that nutrition may play a role in the development or maintenance of depression. There is a direct  relationship between depression and need of several nutrients (carbohydrates, tryptophan, and vitamins) So, start doing remedial mental exercises as soon as you can. To further boost the best results, provide optimal nutrition for the brain like omega-3 rich foods (fish oil capsules, fish, omega-3 rich vegetarian options like dry fruits-walnuts and almonds, etc.)

Reference:

1.Nutrition and depression, By Christensen, Larry Christensen, Larry ,(1996). Diet–behavior relationships: Focus on depression, (pp. 89-108). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, vi, 209 pp.

2.http://regainmentalhealth.com/?p=125