I already do crosswords and sudoku. Do I need anything else?

Here is ques­tion sev­en of 25 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions. To down­load the com­plete ver­sion, please click here.

Ques­tion:
I already do cross­words and sudoku. Do I need any­thing else?

Key Points:

• Recre­ation­al activ­i­ties like cross­word puz­zles, sudoku, bridge, chess, pok­er, etc. are all good for you and bet­ter than doing nothing.
• BUT, recre­ation­al activ­i­ties are lim­it­ed in their range of men­tal cross-train­ing as well as dif­fi­cult to con­trol for both chal­lenge and novelty.

Answer:
What you’re doing is fun and can’t hurt. But nor is it com­plete. Recent rec­om­men­da­tions made by a pan­el of experts review­ing a poll by the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging stat­ed “A sin­gle activ­i­ty, no mat­ter how chal­leng­ing, is not suf­fi­cient to sus­tain the kind of men­tal acu­ity that vir­tu­al­ly every­one can achieve.”

Using your brain to solve cre­ative chal­lenges is excel­lent prac­tice and will help slow down the effects of aging. The lim­i­ta­tion with your cur­rent brain work­out pro­gram is that it does not have enough vari­ety or nov­el­ty to work out all your men­tal mus­cles. Have you ever seen the guys in the gym with the buff upper bod­ies sup­port­ed by lit­tle chick­en legs? The same thing can hap­pen in your brain. Just as you cross-train in your phys­i­cal fit­ness rou­tine (mix­ing car­dio with strength train­ing and flex­i­bil­i­ty) to get a bal­anced work­out, you need to cross-train your men­tal fit­ness to exer­cise your brain through motor coor­di­na­tion, emo­tion­al under­stand­ing, mem­o­ry, focus and atten­tion, sen­so­ry process­es, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, lan­guage skills, and men­tal visualization.

Fur­ther­more, how can you gauge your improve­ment if you don’t have a way to mea­sure it? Using com­put­er soft­ware to give you a base­line score, work­out rou­tines for your brain, and fol­low up tests gives you a mea­sure of your improve­ment. So basi­cal­ly, right now you may be doing a high­ly focused work­out using lan­guage and mem­o­ry but with incon­sis­tent chal­lenge and lim­it­ed feed­back. A struc­tured pro­gram should give you assess­ment, nov­el­ty, and per­for­mance-based chal­lenge while still being fun. That men­tal stim­u­la­tion can dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase the rate of neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, or the cre­ation of new neu­rons and the con­nec­tions between neurons.

A ran­dom­ized con­trolled dou­ble-blind study pub­lished in August 2006 “demon­strates that inten­sive, plas­tic­i­ty-engag­ing train­ing can result in an enhance­ment of cog­ni­tive func­tion in nor­mal mature adults.” Chal­leng­ing cog­ni­tive func­tion leads to learn­ing and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis. So keep doing cross­words and sudoku, espe­cial­ly if you enjoy them, but don’t neglect the rest of your brain!

Con­clu­sion:
Do activ­i­ties you enjoy, but be sure to do things that chal­lenge you with new and dif­fer­ent types of stimulation.

Fur­ther Reading

• Gamon D. and Brag­don A. Build­ing Men­tal Mus­cle: Con­di­tion­ing Exer­cis­es for the Six Intel­li­gence Zones (Walk­er & Com­pa­ny; 2003). ISBN: 0802776698
• Mah­ncke HW, Con­nor BB, Appel­man J, et al. Mem­o­ry enhance­ment in healthy old­er adults using a brain plas­tic­i­ty-based train­ing pro­gram: a ran­dom­ized, con­trolled study. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2006;103:12523–8.
• Scarmeas N, Stern Y. Cog­ni­tive reserve and lifestyle. J Clin Exp Neu­ropsy­chol. 2003;25:625–33.
• Willis SL, Tennst­edt SL, Mar­siske M, et al. Long-term effects of cog­ni­tive train­ing on every­day func­tion­al out­comes in old­er adults. JAMA. 2006;296:2805–14.