Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on life­long cog­ni­tive fit­ness, “men­tal cap­i­tal­ism”, and more,  with Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, co-author of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, mod­er­ated by Harry Moody, Direc­tor of Aca­d­e­mic Affairs at AARP.

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Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion today on mem­ory, mem­ory tech­niques and brain-healthy lifestyles with Dr. Gary  Small, Direc­tor of UCLA’s Mem­ory Clinic and Cen­ter on Aging, and author of The Mem­ory Bible. You can learn more about his book  Here, and learn more about upcom­ing Brain Fit­ness Q&A Ses­sions Here.

Per­haps one of the best ques­tions and answers was:

2:55
Ques­tion: Gary, you’ve worked many years in this field. Let us in on the secret. What do YOU do you, per­son­ally, to pro­mote your own brain fit­ness?
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Answer: I try to get at least 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic con­di­tion­ing each day; try to min­i­mize my stress by stay­ing con­nected with fam­ily and friends; gen­er­ally eat a brain healthy diet (fish, fruits, veg­eta­bles), and try to bal­ance my online time with my offline time. Which reminds me, I think it is almost time for me to sign off line. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Adrian Preda, our newest Expert Con­trib­u­tor, writes today the first in a series of thought-provoking arti­cles, chal­leng­ing us to think about phys­i­cal exer­cise as the best and most unap­pre­ci­ated form of “brain exer­cise”. A superb article.

And one thing is clear, he points out: “the brain really likes it when it’s asked to be “active”. Pas­sive audi­ences, which are spoon fed infor­ma­tion, score less well when tested on reten­tion and under­stand­ing of the pre­sented mate­r­ial than audi­ences that were kept engaged through the process.”

So, will you write a com­ment below and con­tribute to an engag­ing con­ver­sa­tion? Thoughts? reac­tions? ques­tions?
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Don’t ignore plain old com­mon sense.

Brain Lessons Part 1

– By Adrian Preda, M.D.

Let me start with a list of com­mon biases: expen­sive is bet­ter than cheap, free is of dubi­ous value (why would then be free?), rare is likely to be valu­able, and while new is bet­ter than old, ancient is always best. Which explains a com­mon sce­nario that is reen­acted about twice a week in my office. It starts like this: a patient shows me a fancy look­ing bot­tle of the brain sup­ple­ment of the week: ancient roots with obscure names mixed together in another novel com­bi­na­tion which you can exclu­sively find in that one and only store (rar­ity oblige!). And not to for­get: it ain’t cheap either! Of course, there it is, the per­fect the recipe for suc­cess: ancient yet new, rare and expen­sive. It got to be good! But is it, really?

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Below you have a very insight­ful arti­cle on stress by one of our new Expert Con­trib­u­tors, Gre­gory Kel­let, a researcher at UCSF. Enjoy! (Credit for Pic of Vic­to­ria Crater in Mars: Mars Recon­nais­sance Orbiter, via Wikipedia).

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“My brain is fried, toast, fraz­zled, burnt out. How many times have you said or heard one ver­sion or another of these state­ments. Most of us think we are being fig­u­ra­tive when we utter such phrases, but research shows that the bio­log­i­cal con­se­quences of sus­tained high lev­els of stress may have us being more accu­rate than we would like to think.

Crash Course on Stress

Our bod­ies are a com­plex bal­anc­ing act between sys­tems work­ing full time to keep us alive and well. This bal­anc­ing act is con­stantly adapt­ing to the myr­iad of changes occur­ring every sec­ond within our­selves and our envi­ron­ments. When it gets dark our pupils dilate, when we get hot we sweat, when we smell food we sali­vate, and so forth. This con­stant bal­anc­ing act main­tains a range of sta­bil­ity in the body via change; and is often referred to as allosta­sis. Any change which threat­ens this bal­ance can be referred to as allo­sta­tic load or stress.

Allo­sta­tic load/stress is part of being alive. For exam­ple just by get­ting up in the morn­ing, we all expe­ri­ence a very impor­tant need to increase our heart rate and blood pres­sure in order to feed our newly ele­vated brain. Although usu­ally man­age­able, this is a change which the body needs to adapt to and, by our def­i­n­i­tion, a stressor.

Stress is only a prob­lem when this allo­sta­tic load becomes over­load. When change is exces­sive or Read the rest of this entry »