Brain games

Tricks to help make your aging cerebral matter feel less stupid Tricks will help make your aging cerebral matter feel less stupid Meet my brain. It is the size of basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s fist and consistency of flan, it weighs as much as a two-slice toaster, and it looks like ground round with a high fat content. If you saw it at the butcher’s, you’d ask for something a little less beige. If you were a plastic surgeon, you’d say my brain needed a face-lift. The reason my brain is so wrinkly and ridged is, like a suitcase packed with a lot of junk, it contains too many neurons to fit smoothly inside my skull. Of late I’ve been a bit worried about my aging brain. When I ask it a simple question such as, “What is the word for that thing that’s sort of a harmonica but more annoying and looks like you could smoke pot with it?” or when I look for my glasses while wearing my glasses, I think, “My, my, it’s going to be a very smooth transition to dementia.” How is it that certain minds seem able to forestall senescence, while others succumb? You may have read in some magazine whose name I can’t recall that we can affect the resilience of our brains by investing in them early on, banking mental health as if in a 401(k) — to borrow an analogy from psychologist Sherrie All. This notion hinges on the widely accepted theories of brain reserve and cognitive reserve. Kenneth Kosik, a neurologist and neuroscience professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained these two kindred concepts to me during a rapid discourse he called “The History of Alzheimer’s in Thirty Seconds,” which lasted about half an hour. Here’s the short version: In 1988, autopsies of several elderly people revealed the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, these individuals had displayed no signs of dementia during their lifetimes. It has been hypothesized that they’d been buffered from the disease’s effects by the extra neuronal capacity they had been born with (brain reserve) or accrued through years of intellectual and physical pursuits (cognitive reserve). Similarly, a study that analyzed the essays written by 678 elderly religious sisters when they were in their 20s found those who had used the most linguistically complex sentences were the least likely to have Alzheimer’s. The damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer’s can be compared with traffic jams caused by tractor-trailer accidents. Someone who has a robust neural network can find ways around these obstructions using back roads. However, that does not work forever. Unless you have the good luck to kick the bucket before your roadways become disastrously clogged, sooner or later even you, with your clever compensatory strategies, will have difficulty getting from here to there. Paradoxically, those with higher IQs, more education or higher occupation achievement deteriorate faster than average once they show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. To wit, if I may use that phrase, researchers found that every year of education postpones the memory failure associated with dementia by 2½ months, but once the pathology becomes apparent, the rate of diminishment is 4 percent faster. Back to my old noggin. What would it take to — poof — transform it into a spiffy young noggin? For four months, I crammed my days and nights with as many brain-boosting pursuits as I could stand. For example, I learned Cherokee, zapped electricity into my brain, meditated, did online brain exercises and, for one day, gave up Diet Coke. Before and after my get smart program, I had my brain imaged and my IQ taken. Did I get less stupid? I can’t reveal that secret. Actually I can. It’s on page 182 of my new book, “Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties.” Take the quiz on this page, which is a list of self-improvement endeavors that purportedly vitalize your mind. I culled them from various books and websites. Some I invented. Work your brain to figure out which ones are bona fide.

Can 15 mins of brain training a day keep ageing away?

To answer this question, Adam Shaw travels to Japan, and gets beaten at simple maths by a brain-trained 80-year-old. In the town of Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region in Japan, there are a million people going about their daily lives. I have no idea what all but one of them is doing. One lady, Ms Endo Tokiko, who won't mind me revealing that she is in her 80s, is almost certainly telling everyone around her, how she defeated, conquered, trounced and thoroughly overwhelmed an English man almost half her age. What's more she will no doubt explain how she did it with ease, while the short bald Englishman from the BBC, sweated with effort. More of which later. I was in Sendai to meet Dr Ryuta Kawashima. He is a Japanese neuroscientist whose work has involved mapping the regions of the brain which control emotion, language, memory and cognition. He is well known in academic circles for his research. However more unusually he is also known to millions of ordinary adults and children as the animated figure in the Nintendo DS Brain Game. Unlike his fellow neuroscientists he has a fan club of millions. In 2003, Kawashima wrote a book called 'Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain'. It was not only a success in Japan. It sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide. That not only lead to the publication of a whole series of other books, it also piqued the interest of the Japanese gaming company Nintendo who turned his brain training programme into a game which itself sold millions of copies. At Tohoku University, he helped found the Smart Aging International Research Centreand the Department of Advanced Brain Science. At the centre he is working with groups of elderly people to see how to keep their brains active for longer. As part of his experiments, he runs regular mental workouts or gyms for people who are largely in their 80s or older. His belief is that through some fairly basic exercises, repeated often, we can enlarge the functionality of the brain and stop and indeed reverse the ageing process of some brain functions. Indeed one of his concerns is that as we increasingly rely on computers for information and to process and interpret data for us, our brains have to do less. The modern world, in other words, is making our brains duller. Kawashima believes that exercising one function of the brain can improve its other functions. This could be very important because it implies that if we regularly do some simple maths exercises, such as easy addition and subtraction, we may not only get better at remembering names and where we put our car keys but our brain will become sharper at most tasks. Three times a week, a group of the older Sendai residents make their way to Dr Kawashima's brain gym to give their mental facilities a tightly monitored workout. I recently joined them. Wearing a brain monitor that linked to an app on Dr Kawashima's smart phone, I was to go up against their star pupil. Ms Endo Tokikosat next to me. She was composed, self-possessed, unruffled, unmoved and unemotional. She stared ahead unsmiling and uncommunicative. I, on the other hand, was a little nervous but fairly confident that whilst I was no maths genius, I could do some easy additions and should be able to do them faster than an 80 year old. Dr Kawashima then said: "You may turn over your paper and begin." A phrase I had not heard for many years. I rushed through the first 10 questions - quietly confident that I was going to be an easy winner. My complacency was shattered when I heard Ms Tokiko turning her second page - I didn't want to look across at her as it would slow me down but I was still half way through page one. I finished the first section and glanced across at my opponent who was now rushing towards the end. With an almost imperceptible smile, she placed her pencil down and looked at Dr Kawashima - no words were needed but Dr Kawashima shouted them anyway. Ms Tokikohad won. I genuinely could not believe I had been so roundly trounced. What's more, an analysis of our brain patterns during the exercise revealed something even more shocking. Whilst I had used all my mental guns, lighting up the brain monitor like Piccadilly Circus, Tokiko's brain monitor showed how she was only using a very small part of her faculties. As Dr Kawashima explained to me - not only had I been beaten badly but my opponent had done it with one arm tied behind her back - she had used only a fraction of her brain power whilst I had brought everything I had to the game. This fantastic performance, he said, was the result of 15 minutes a day of brain training. The fact that I had to look up the name of my opponent whilst she no doubt remembers mine to this very day - may also be a sign of which one of us is regularly doing our little brain training exercises.