Staying Sharp For Dummies
Overview
Insight and actionable information on keeping your brain sharp as you age
Your brain controls who you are—how you think, feel, and act. As you age, it's not uncommon to want to remain as sharp and "with it" as you were in your younger years. Whether you want to hone your memory, manage stress and anxiety, or simply eat brain-healthy food, Staying Sharp For Dummies shows you how to keep your mind sharp, agile, and creative well into your golden years.
Research shows anyone can improve brain performance—and it's never too late to make changes to achieve your optimal brain health. While brain exercises certainly help, it's also vital to promote healthier living as a holistic way to support brain health. Staying Sharp For Dummies explains how keeping physically fit, eating right, managing
stress, and even connecting with others helps give your brain the boost it needs to stay sharp—well into your golden years.
- Build a better brain through nutrition, lifestyle changes, and brain workouts
- Cope with a specific brain disorder, such as stroke, Dementia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's
- Stay sharp and improve memory and concentration
- Access an online bonus chapter from Alzheimer's For Dummies and Dementia For Dummies
If you or a loved one are looking for authoritative, accessible guidance on staying sharp, this essential guide endorsed by the American Geriatric Society and the American Geriatric Society Health in Aging Foundation covers the gamut of lifestyle and activity changes that can maximize brain function and health.
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About The Author
The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is a nationwide, not-for-profit society of geriatrics healthcare professionals dedicated to improving the health, independence, and quality of life of older people.
The Health in Aging Foundation is a national non-profit organization established in 1999 by AGS to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public.
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staying sharp for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Make your brain work for you. Staying sharp and having an active mind are key to a healthy life as you age. Arm yourself with tips on keeping a sharp mind, informative ways to improve your memory, and ideas on how to reduce stress in order to keep sharp.
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Home may be the place you feel safest, but statistically, it's the place you're most likely to be injured. People age 65 and older consistently experience the highest numbers of home-injury-related deaths. Preventing injuries at home is common sense, but most people don't think about dangerous situations until they get injured.
Several foods fall short of the truly "super" standard, but they're still good for you. These are called almost-superfoods. These almost-superfoods are delicious, are usually easy to find in grocery stores, and add variety to your diet while keeping your body healthy and your mind sharp.Whole-grain products retain the fiber and natural nutrients found in grains, such as wheat, barley, and spelt (similar to wheat but with a sweeter, nuttier flavor).
If logic puzzles appeal to you, you'll probably like riddles as well. These two types of puzzles are close cousins; however, riddles are often shorter than logic puzzles and involve plays on language.
As with logic puzzles and other puzzle types, each riddle should have just one unique answer. If you can think of two or more reasonable answers to the same riddle, chances are you've outwitted the puzzle constructor!
The great news about the steps you can take to improve your chances of long-term cognitive health is that many of them are the same steps you take to keep your body healthy. You need to add just a couple of items to a list that's probably already familiar. And the new items are fun. © Shutterstock.comHere's the familiar stuff:
Reduce stress.
Aging
Foods, drinks, and chemicals that your brain is exposed to have major effects on your memory. If you eat junk food loaded with sugar, you set yourself up to crash, finding yourself full of anxiety and short of short-term memory. Similarly, if you drink too much caffeine, the liquid anxiety scatters your thoughts and shatters your memory ability.
However, conflict is a part of life. Some people never figure out how to handle it well. As you get older, you may feel like you spend much of your life fighting with people — your younger boss, your kids, your spouse, the girl at the supermarket, your best friend.On one hand, you don't want your middle name to be Doormat, but on the other hand, being in constant conflict with other people is exhausting.
Creative thinking — being able to come up with original solutions to problems — is a great way to encourage your brain to integrate information from different sources. It means not giving up when a problem seems hard but rather finding a different perspective — something unusual or unique.
Not everyone can become the next Beethoven or da Vinci, but here are some things you can do to develop your creative side:
Be prepared.
Not all mnemonic systems are equally effective for everyone. People are unique, and so are their needs and preferences. What you find useful as a mnemonic may be totally useless to your neighbor, and vice versa.
Picking a mnemonic that works for you
Choose the mnemonic that fits best with your experience. Doing so can increase your chances of remembering your memory-aid in the future.
Aging
Society inundates people with stimuli that demand attention. Email, faxes, cellphones, and the constant bombardment of commercials litter our minds and clutter our memories. Life was simpler in years past. Today's world puts more demands on your memory skills.How many things can you pay attention to at the same time?
Some type of spiritual belief system is found in virtually every society on earth. People want and need to believe in something greater than themselves. Some studies have shown that spiritual beliefs and religiosity (participation in an organized religion) increase with age, leading to considerable research into the effects of religion and spirituality on health issues and aging since the 1990s.
Word pegs are so named because you do just that — you peg a word to another word or number that's easier to remember. Pegs are "hooks" that you can use to hold the word you're trying to remember, just like a coat rack peg holds your jacket. By thinking of the peg word, you think of the word you want to remember.
The benefit of IQ tests to measure language skills is that they're based on the responses of thousands of people from different backgrounds. Psychologists use many different types of tests to measure how the brain works, including IQ tests. IQ stands for "intelligence quotient." A person's IQ is defined by how that person performs on one of several standardized tests designed to assess human intelligence.
The American Psychology Association has summarized the consistent memory change patterns that researchers identify in normal older adults compared to younger counterparts in the following categories:
Episodic (what did I eat for supper last night?)
Source (who told me that I should see that new movie?)
Flashbulb (where were you when President Kennedy was shot?
How many times have you found yourself standing in the middle of an aisle full of food, scratching your head and trying to remember what you needed for dinner that night, or suddenly stopping while driving somewhere because you couldn't remember where you were going? These moments happen to everyone.People have busy lives, and sometimes some things like shopping lists or where you're supposed to go get pushed to the back of your mind.
You may already be convinced that a positive attitude can benefit your life, but how do you become a positive person if it doesn't come naturally? It's not as hard you think — being aware of your negativity is half the battle. Figuring out how to turn negativity around is the other half.Although a little negativity is normal in daily life, constant negativity can make you stressed, anxious, depressed, or bitter.
You store information in different parts of your brain. The brain keeps visual information in one part and spatial information in another. However, your brain is very efficient in combining information from different parts to work together when you need to remember something.
The hippocampus is located in the temporal lobe of the brain and is responsible for storing spatial memory and helping you navigate your body in space.
Certain qualities are among the most important skills and behaviors for reducing stress and creating stress resilience. How many of the attributes in the following sections describe you? If you can't check off all (or any!) of the items, don't worry; you can change old habits and learn new ones.Managing your stress isn't a magical process.
If you've never thought of yourself as a creative person, it's time for a change of thinking. Each person has the potential to unlock an aspect of creativity. Here are a few suggestions to help you get going. They include tips on simple drawing activities to get you started — but if you feel that you still need more encouragement, why not simply begin by doodling?
Put on your thinking cap to solve these logic puzzles! Each has just one answer. Levels are Easy, Tricky, Tough, and Treacherous, "Easy" being (of course) the easiest puzzles, and "Treacherous" being the most difficult ones.
Easy: How many times can a mathematician subtract ten from 100?
Easy: Decipher this clue: YYYMEN
Tricky: A woman gave birth to two boys on the same day, in the same year, within minutes of each other, yet they were not twins.
Your ability to remember depends on a number of factors, the first of which is maintaining a healthy brain through adequate nourishment, exercise, and rest. To ensure that your brain works at an optimum level, follow these guidelines:
Eat a balanced diet. What you eat affects your brain's chemistry. Eating the right foods gives your body the building blocks to manufacture brain chemicals called neurotransmitters.
You don't know less in your old age; you know more due to your years of life experience. However, during your advanced years, your information-processing speed slows down a bit. But don't worry; your long-term memory remains intact, and your understanding of what you already know is broader, more thoughtful, and wiser than during your early adulthood.
Would you like to test your visual-spatial IQ? Here are some examples of questions you can answer that can help you do so. Take a look at the following figure.
Can you figure out the next shape in the sequence? You may have correctly guessed that the next shape will be a circle. As you're probably aware, this type of test measures how well you can spot the pattern and follow the sequence of objects.
You retrieve your long-term memories via multiple pathways. The pathway you use to retrieve a memory has a lot to do with how you learned the information in the first place. You may be a visual learner, so you learn by seeing and remember by visualizing the images that you saw. Or you may be an auditory learner, meaning you learn by hearing sounds and retrieve memories by recalling the associated sounds.
As you age, you need to exercise your brain to prevent some of the natural shrinkage. Starting at age 50, your 3-pound brain gradually loses its volume in weight, so that, by age 75, it weighs roughly 2.6 pounds. A lot of the shrinkage in your brain is from a loss of water.
Different parts of your brain lose their volume at different rates.
Aging
A wide variety of techniques can improve your memory skills. Your memory skills form the foundation for most of your thinking abilities. Therefore, by improving your memory skills, you become better able to reach your thinking potential in many ways with the added benefit of increasing your IQ.
The old adage "use it or lose it" applies to your memory.
You've probably heard of mnemonics (nee-mon-iks). Mnemonics are memory devices, such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that help you retain information in ways that you can more easily remember. These devices are cues or links to other information — almost like the hyperlinks you click when surfing the Internet.
Aging
Even the simplest everyday tasks require you to use your visual-spatial memory skills. The good news is that you can improve your visual-spatial skills. The first step is to test them. Try the following fun example.
Test your logic and reasoning
The figure shows a common task that instructors give to psychology students to test their logic and reasoning skills.
Hatice Yardım @ UnsplashReading retention is a big issue in educational circles. Having the ability to read a sentence, pronounce all the words fluently, and have a vocabulary wide enough that doesn't necessitate referring to a dictionary is one thing. But having the ability to remember what you read is something else entirely.
Getting older and being sexually active aren't mutually exclusive. Sexual satisfaction is still possible at any age. Although age-related changes may necessitate some adjustments, where there's a will there's a way. For both men and women, physiological changes to the body make having sex a different experience as you age, but different doesn't mean worse; it just means adapting.
Psychologists refer to two different memory processes: short-term and long-term memory. Each type corresponds to a length of time: A short-term memory (or working memory) generally lasts for no more than 30 seconds; a long-term memory can last a lifetime.Short-term memory is a gateway to long-term memory. A short-term memory must be made before it can be transferred to a long-term memory.
Staying active as you get older means far more than riding your bicycle around the block every evening. It involves both physically being involved in activities in your community and mentally being involved with the world around you. Being connected to your world is good for your health and mental attitude, and it can also benefit those around you.
Searching for the right word in the middle of a conversation can be frustrating. With normal aging, you may take longer to retrieve the word you want to use when engaged in a conversation. However, you don't need to find yourself in a situation where you're searching for the right word. You can do several things to avoid this problem as you get older.
As with crossword puzzles, you were probably introduced to word searches early in life. Most people work them in elementary school to reinforce their spelling and vocabulary lessons.In case you've never seen one before, a word search is simply a grid of letters — in a square or rectangular shape — that contains hidden words.
Cryptograms are more complicated than word searches and word scrambles, and they'll almost certainly require more of your time. But solving a cryptogram is really satisfying — it makes you feel like a master detective — so the extra time is well worth it.A cryptogram is a sentence or phrase that's encrypted or enciphered.
Logic puzzles can take a variety of forms. They can involve words, numbers, or images, and — like all puzzles — they can be fairly easy or extremely difficult to solve.Preparing to solve logic puzzles isn't like preparing to solve a crossword or Sudoku puzzle. You don't need to understand how the puzzle is constructed or what the rules are.
Rote learning is the regurgitation of unattached and meaningless facts. These facts are prone to be forgotten because you haven't incorporated them into a body of knowledge. You have no context in which to remember them.Unfortunately, too much of what's taught in school is still based on rote learning. Your job is to deepen the meaning of what you learn and put it in context so that you can remember it later.
Everyone loves a good story. You use stories as a way to learn, teach, and pass the time. You can also use stories to link information you want to remember.
The link system: Remembering a list without paper and pencil
The link system is a mnemonic technique that helps you link memories of serial-type information, such as lists of words.
Scientific evidence demonstrates that musical training improves memory; musicians tend to remember more information compared to non-musicians, even when you take their education levels and their ages into account. In other words, playing a musical instrument activates part of the brain (the cerebral cortex), which in turn boosts recall of information.
The cognitive reserve theory essentially says that people who have a larger reserve of neurons and stronger cognitive abilities can tolerate some brain deterioration without showing symptoms.This theory resulted from a study published in the Annals of Neurology in the late 1980s, which raised questions about why some people develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and some don't.
"Is the brain of a creative person different from a methodical person?" To answer that question, researchers looked at the brain activity of those who solve problems creatively with that burst of "Aha!" compared to those who solve problems more systematically.They asked each participant to relax for a few minutes while they used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to record the electrical activity in participants' brains.
Aging
Aging can bring major life changes. Staying positive and happy isn't always easy in your older years, when you may lose people near and dear to you, have unexpected health issues, have children move away, retire from a job that meant the world to you, or need to move out of the family home.Yet, contrary to popular opinion, getting older doesn't mean you become more negative.
To keep yourself on top of the game as you get older, there's no way around it: You have to embrace some lifestyle changes. They can be gradual, and you can focus on one at a time. But to get any benefit, you do need to invest some effort. The more effort you make, the more benefit you get as you seek to stay sharp.
Visual-spatial memory skills are how you learn about the world right from the beginning. As a baby, your visual-spatial skills are especially strong. Perhaps because babies haven't yet developed language skills, they're able to quickly take a snapshot of the world and remember certain visual features.Think for a moment about a baby's world.
You can do a wide variety of things to improve your memory. However, no one thing alone can give you the stellar memory skills you want and deserve. You have to be willing to make lifestyle changes to help you stay sharp.
Relax your brain
You need a calm and alert mind to be able to use your memory skills to their full potential.
On the off chance that you aren't a neurologist, here are a couple of definitions: Neurons are cells that make up your central nervous system — your brain and spinal column, and the nerves connected to them. Synapses are tiny connections between the neurons in your brain.
When synapses are working correctly, they allow your neurons to communicate with each other, which keeps your nervous system functioning the way it should.
To improve your memory, you need to know what memory is and isn't. You need to understand the facts about your memory and discard the myths.Some of the following facts may surprise you:
Your memories are constantly reshaping throughout your life. They aren't snapshots of information, frozen in time. Throughout your life, you go through all sorts of changes: You mature, learn from previous mistakes, and even get tainted by unfortunate experiences.
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