This is an excellent article on aging and dementia. If you stop learning, you stop living.
“In the same way elite athletes and their trainers use the concept of muscle confusion (varying the types and duration of exercises to expose weaknesses and challenge muscles in new ways) to maximize their physical fitness, switching up the things you do to engage your mental muscle can help maximize your mental fitness.”
In fitness, Bob
Cognitive reserve, the term used to describe the mechanism by which a person’s mind can compensate for damage to their brain, has become a buzzword among seniors and their caregivers, thanks to its connection to one of the most infamous issues of modern aging: dementia.
Research indicates that people who have solid stores of cognitive reserve are generally less likely to exhibit the classic signs of dementia—short-term memory loss, difficulty multitasking, etc.—even if their brain scans indicate mental damage. This is because cognitive reserve effectively makes the mind stronger and more nimble, enabling it to come up with ways to compensate for disease-related loss of functioning.
Seek out and embrace new challenges; your brain will thank you
Shlomo Breznitz, Ph.D., founder of Cognifit, and co-author (with Collins Hemingway) of “Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom,” feels that finding ways to consistently engage the brain with new and…
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