Do you forget what you walked into the bedroom to get?
One of the most common fears people have as they grow older is losing their memory. Keeping your brain healthy and your memory sharp is about more than doing puzzles or remembering what you needed in a room.
In South Florida, experts are using new approaches to fight off memory loss. Rather than Sudoku and crossword puzzles, their approaches to a mental workout or “brain fitness” involve everything from building physical muscle to meditation to following a recipe. And they recommend starting brain fitness well before the senior years.
“It’s important to start practicing whole brain fitness now because the process of cognitive changes can start 20 years before symptoms present,” gerontologist Beverly Sanborn said.
Sanborn says a full mental workout includes six categories of brain fitness: critical thinking, body movement, step-by-step sequencing, learning something new, devising analytics solutions, and doing regular long-term memory exercises.