Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises
by: Lawrence Katz, Manning Rubin
Topics include:
About the Author
Dr. Lawrence Katz is a professor of neurobiology and researcher at Duke University Medical Center. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. Manning Rubin, a former advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, is now flexing his brain as Senior Creative Supervisor at K2 Design Inc. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
As the population of over 76 million Baby Boomers approaches middle age and beyond, the issue of preserving mental powers throughout greatly increased life spans has reached an almost fever pitch. There is a growing interest in - and optimism about - preserving and enhancing the brain's capabilities into senior years. With the help of powerful new tools of molecular biology and brain imaging, neuroscientists around the world have literally been looking into the mind as it thinks. Almost daily, they are discovering that many of the negative myths about the aging brain are, indeed, only myths: "Older and wiser" is not just a hopeful cliche but can be the reality. In much the same way that you can maintain your physical well-being, you can take charge of your mental health and fitness.
Although new and therefore not yet proved by large body of tests, Neurobics is based on solid scientific ground; it is an exciting synthesis of substantial findings about the brain that provides a concrete strategy for keeping the brain fit and flexible as you grow older.
From Theory to Practice
Jane reached into her pocketbook and fished inside for the keys to her apartment. Usually they were in the outside flap but not today. "Did I forget them?! No...here they are." She felt their shapes to figure out which one would open the top lock. It took her two tries until she heard the welcome click of the lock opening. Inside the door she reached to the left for the light switch...but why bother? Her husband would do that later. Touching the wall lightly with her fingertips, she moved to the closet on the right, found it, and hung up her coat. She turned slowly and visualized in her mind the location of the table holding her telephone and answering machine. Carefully she headed in that direction, guided by the feel of the leather armchair and the scent of a vase of birthday roses, anxious to avoid the sharp edge of the coffee table and hoping to have some messages from her family waiting.
The table. The answering machine. She reached out and brushed her fingers across what she believed to be the play button. "What if I push the delete button?" she thought, and again checked to make sure she was right. Yesterday it was so easy. She could have done all this simply by looking around. Today was different. She could see nothing.
But Jane had not suddenly gone blind. At age 50, she was introducing a lifestyle strategy called Neurobics into her daily activities. Based on recent discoveries in brain science, Neurobics is a new form of brain exercise designed to help keep the brain agile and healthy. By breaking her usual homecoming routine, Jane had placed her brain's attentional circuits in high gear. With her eyes closed, she had to rely on her senses of touch, smell, hearing, and spatial memory to do something they rarely did - navigate through her apartment. And she was involving her emotional sense by feeling the stresses of not being able to see. All these actions created new and different patterns of neuron activity in her brain - which is how Neurobics works.
This book will explain the principles behind Neurobics and how the exercises enhance the overall health of your brain as you grow older.
BRUSHING ROULETTE
Brush your teeth with your nondominant hand (including opening the tube and applying toothpaste). You can substitute any morning activity - styling your hair, shaving, applying makeup, buttoning clothes, putting in cuff links, eating or using the TV remote.
* This exercise requires you to use the opposite side of your brain instead of the side you normally use. Consequentially, all those circuits, connections, and brain areas involved in using your dominant hand are inactive, while their counterparts on the other side of your brain are suddenly required to direct a set of behavior in which they usually don't participate. Research has shown that this type of exercise can result in a rapid and substantial expansion of circuits in the parts of the cortex that control and process tactile information from the hand.
Variation
Use only one hand to do tasks like buttoning a shirt, tying a shoe, or getting dressed. For a real workout, try using just your nondominant hand.
Another exercise that associates unusual sensory and motor pathways in your cortex with a routine activity is to use your feet to put your socks and underwear in the laundry basket or pick out your shoes for the day.
Excerpted from How to Keep Your Brain Alive. Copyright (c) 1999 by Lawrence C. Katz and Manning Rubin. Reprinted with permission by Workman Publishing.
Reviews:
This is something unique-an easy way to keep the mind strongReviewed by Nancy Newman whose novel "Disturbing The Peace" is to be published by Avon Books this fall If you've been suffering periodic memory lapses lately and are worried a your middle-aged brain is turning to mush, take heart. Help is here in the form of a terrific little book called Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence C. Katz,Ph.D. and Manning Rubin. Based on the latest scientific research from around the world, the book offers a short explanation of how the brain functions, then goes on to describe a unique program called neurobics (aerobics for the brain) which can keep your mind healthy and agile even as you and your brain age The balance of science and exercises is organized and written in a way that let's you understand enough about what's happening in the brain without bogging you down with technical explanations. Basically the system uses the brain's ability to produce it's own nutrients that strengthen and preserve brain cells and applies that to the discovery that nerve cells in adult brains can be stimulated to grow dendrites with these nutrients. As we age our lives tend to become so routinized that we rely too heavily on only one or two senses and many pathways in the brain's circuits become inactive. As a result there is a thinning out of dendrites. Since these threadlike tendrils receive and process information from nerve cell to nerve cell, our minds can begin to feel sluggish. But according to the authors, this situation can be vastly improved by presenting the brain with unexpected combinations of the senses in novel ways, thereby stimulating it to increase the health and complexity of its dendrites and thus giving memory and mental agility a boost. The eighty-three exercises offered in the book are simple, fun and easy to integrate into daily life. Try brushing your teeth or buttoning your shirt in the morning with your less dominant hand. Scramble the location of familiar objects in your office. Take a whiff of pungent spices at an ethnic market. Make your way through your bedroom without turning on a light. You're giving your neural pathways a workout. Soon you'll be thinking up your own neurobic exercises. Growing older doesn't have to mean growing dimmer, say Katz and Rubin, not if you start living neurobically.
This book was published in 1999. Now six years later, the baby boomers are moving beyond middle age into their 60's! There is no way that anyone working as a professor in Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center could get away with selling a book founded on fluff. Katz has structured a daily self responsible system which transposes complex principles of brain development into an accessible experiential application for the general public. He has provided a great service in an age where Alzheimers is indeed a threat to aging. His daily guides *do* work and they do stimulate the parts of the brain and neurosensors to which Katz refers. My husband and I have had a great deal of fun with this book. We're both active and (for right now) healthy and happy baby boomers. Writing with the non dominant hand one day this week as directed in the book, was challenging. I realized the great strength of the large motor muscles in my left hand from playing the piano professionally. The primary challenge was staying with the writing long enough to move through the frustrations of not being able to write well. I became increasingly aware of the astute vulnerable weakness of the small motor muscle control in my left hand and wanted to give up but didn't. As adults, we are usually rigid when it comes to revealing our vulnerabilities. This book challenges adults to penetrate their comfort zones and not wait until there is a stroke or some other debilitating condition which leaves a person without eyesight, hearing, the use of a sense or a particular area of the brain. Katz challenges the adult to minimize the two dominant senses, the visual and auditory, in his daily neurobic assignments. He makes it clear how the less used senses in modern times have been blunted in the modern technological societies. Katz renders an expansive and interesting history of how the ancient (such as the Polynesian sailors) used the senses in ways that we no longer do. Their olfactory and touch senses kept the brain active. Thus, this assisted them in surviving the wilds of nature. The book is an interesting read and is sure to keep the reader plenty busy re-charging the electrical passageways of the wonderful gift with which we are all born, the human brain. As a person who has lived with a congenital hearing loss, I have long been acquainted with sense adaptability. Hats off to Katz for an accessible, intriguing, and fun book!
A good read, but a psychology course would be better
I do not dispute the scientific facts in the beginning of the book. In fact, they line up very well to the academic research that is being thought in introductory psychology courses. But I do have to agree with some reviewers in how Dr. Katz presents the concept of neurobic exercises as a means of increasing neurotrophin production. While the causation is very clear in that injecting neurotrophins increases neural connections, there is no correlation yet that the novel exercises presented can stimulate neurotrophin production.
On the other hand, I do see how learning a new language, social interaction, or making love can stimulate the brain, so I can see the positive benefits of these exercises. But I really don't see how it produces neurotrophins, which are crucial in Katz view in maintaing mental fitness.
But the lack of stronger premises in supporting neurobics, doesn't make this book any less effective in showing that people do "autopilot" around the world with routines. In effect our routines have made us a bit mindless, and I can see how this book would help some people be aware of their mindless routines.