Maximizing brain fitness and mental well-being improves both public health and individual quality of life

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 We’re hav­ing a good con­ver­sa­tion among Sharp­Brains Sum­mit par­tic­i­pants, prompt­ed by the blog post Life­long brain well­ness and performance–not med­ical disease–drives grow­ing demand for dig­i­tal brain health solu­tions. In what is a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the need to see both the for­est and the trees, first Prof. Bob Bilder, Co-Direc­tor of the NIMH-spon­sored Cen­ter for Inter­ven­tion Devel­op­ment and Applied Research (CIDAR) at UCLA, offered this insight­ful big-pic­ture response:

Inter­est­ing­ly, this trend may also have the pos­i­tive out­come of *pre­vent­ing* even more ill­ness, com­pared to efforts to find cures for ill­ness. For exam­ple, a mod­er­ate increase in stress-resilien­cy across a pop­u­la­tion could reduce by 2/3 the risk of stress-relat­ed disease.

Then, anoth­er Sum­mit par­tic­i­pant, a half-retired ser­i­al entre­pre­neur, offered this first-hand perspective:

I have seen this phe­nom­e­non in my own life. For the past 25 years I have been train­ing my brain; med­i­ta­tion, vig­or­ous men­tal stim­u­la­tion, phys­i­cal exer­cis­es and for the last 5 years exer­cis­ing with com­put­er­ized brain train­ing pro­grams. I self-mon­i­tor my emo­tions and gen­er­al well­be­ing every day. I am 78 years old and like any­body else con­front­ed with the dai­ly ups and down of life. What is very inter­est­ing to me is that at this point I do not pan­ic or despair often anymore.…Less stress, more con­trol of your emo­tions, hence bet­ter health.

Quot­ing William Gib­son, “The future is already here – it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted.”

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Pic source: Big­Stock­Pho­to