Essential Mental Activities

Here are some of those activities that you can do now to maintain your brain?

1. Reading, writing, reciting and arithmetic or sharing any new knowledge with others.
   We often take these abilities for granted, but they are all rather complex skills,  requiring a wide variety of mental activities (which we often take for granted in our brain). 
   
   These 4 phonetic R’s (Reading, wRiting, Reciting & aRithmetic,) require us to recognize a wide variety of ink scratches or print patterns, which we call words, or numbers and their meanings, and then linking them all together in a sentence that makes sense, that conjures up pictures, ideas and memories in our minds and imagination. And then later retrieving these pictures, ideas or memories from where our brain stored them, to share with others.
   
   Some experts believe one of the reasons more seniors these days are losing these mental abilities is due to the fact that in this modern electronic world that we live in, with computers, cell phones and televisions, we don’t need to use these skills as much as our grandparents did. All we have to do is sit, with our eyes, or at least, our ears open, and the pictures and info just pour in.  It’s a very passive process requiring little to no efforts on our part. 

Some of us don’t even know our own telephone numbers without looking it up on our cell phone, let alone the phone numbers of other friends and family. And who needs a memory when you have a cell phone, that you can ask any question at any time, and it will give you the info or answers you seek, often time audibly so you don’t even have to read the answers.  But these electronic devices can be helpful for our brain as well, if we use them as we could. A study conducted by Gary Smalley, MD at UCLA showed the seniors who surfed the internet on a regular basis, looking for interesting information, ended up with brains that were significantly more flexable than those who did not. 

Apparently, Web searching enhances brain circuitry even in older adults and we can continue to learn as we age. See 4R activities to consider below.

Unfortunately, as noted our brain is very much a use it or lose it organ. And when we don’t push ourselves to use the various abilities that our brain was designed and equipped for, like remembering names, calculating numbers, organizing puzzles, reasoning, recoding and remembering things from our recent and distant past, we tend to lose our ability to do so.  

Of course the causes of memory loss are typically more complicated than that but nevertheless, it’s not a bad idea to keep in mind that our brain is very much a use it or lose it organ, and we need to make a conscious effort to continue learning and sharing new things. 

4R activities to consider: (Read through these then note down on a pad, a computer doc, or cell phone note pad, the items here that you would like to do more often.)

Read your email daily, as well as news items in a newspaper or on our cell phone or internet via your computers. Look up topics of personal interest or controvery on your computer or phone and read through these. Or read a book or magazine article daily or nightly, for at least 15 min, a day. (Note: It’s not advised to work on your computer or cell phone or even watch TV shortly before bed or in bed, as these can impair the production of melatonin in your brain needed to help you go to sleep.)

Write email or text something or someone on a daily basis. Send notes to family members and friends. Birthday cards, Thank you cards, etc. Make notes re things that are important to you,  from the things you read, in a special place, preferably handwritten in a notebook, or in a computer doc/file. Add to these periodically. Keep a journal of significant things that happen to you, your thoughts, feelings, lessons learned, past experiences etc. 

You may want to consider writing a book or booklet for your posterity of the things you have learned in life. Daily experiences, or past events that helped shape you life and things you learned from these. Share your wisdom while you can. This may be of great interest or value to others. 

Recite to yourself or others things you have recently learned. This periodic repetition or recalling of what we recently learned is considered to be “the mother of memory.” But even better is reciting, sharing or teaching that to someone else, your spouse, friends, even pets, will help to solidify that in your own mind. When you watch TV with a partner or friends, especially the news, engage them in conversation about what they just saw. Ask their opinions, then share your own. If you have differences of opinion share those. That has been shown to be even more stimulating for the brain than just agreeing all the time. And if you don’t have anything new to share, don’t be bashful about sharing memorable experiences from your past, and lessons learned. 

Memorizing is also a great activity to stimulate your brain and memory making system. 

See Memory Improvement for some tips on how to memorize. Memorizing favorite bits of wisdom, scripture or poetry can make it easier to share this info more accurately with others.   

Arithmetic and numbers. Memoryze the phone numbers of all your family members and close friends, at least your spouse and closest friends (in case you need help and your cell phone has died and you need to use someone else’s phone to call for help).

Practice adding the cost of grocery items in your head. Keep track of your bank accounts and credit card balances in your head. Track their totals or how much you have available and then how much you will have left after paying regular bills, grocery items or making any other payments. You might also want to consider learning how to play Sudoku.