Ask yourself the tough questions: Do you mind your brain? Do you know your noggin’? Can you claim cerebral ownership or is your mental a rental?
Although these questions are relevant at virtually all lifespan stages, firm answers can sometimes appear inconceivable. Unfortunately with advancing age, attention to mental performance is often either abandoned or framed in terms of perceived impairment and decline. Now, I have previously shared my message on minding the aging brain with SharpBrains readers. As a cognitive neuropsychiatrist primarily interested in later-life phenomena, I tend to stick to my area of expertise. Nevertheless, whether you are elder or not, I implore you to take these ideas to heart…do you mind?
Just as brain fitness is for all, aging is similarly universal. Every thoughtful individual recognizes the unavoidable answer to “are you aging?” However, the answer to “how are you aging?” is less obvious to most, and is even more obscure when considering lifespan cognitive trajectories. In fact, no consensus lexicon yet exists to describe the ways in which cognition can be modulated to achieve desired lifestyle or clinical goals.
In my latest publication on technology-enabled cognitive training for healthy elders, I outline a proposed lexicon for positive cognition interventions, as well as a framework for classifying putative benefits of cognitive training. Here, I will present these concepts without regard to age, as they apply equally well to all sapient sapiens:
? Cognitive stimulation refers to nontargeted engagement that generally enhances mental functioning. Examples might include educational endeavors or life review.
? Cognitive training refers to theory-driven intervention, [Read more…] about Do You Mind?