Keep Your Body Moving to Stay Brain Young

What does your brain need to Stay Brain Young? A great blood flow. How do you get that? Through physical exercise.

A Dana Foundation reports that Columbia University neuroscientist Scott Small and colleagues found that a "structured exercise training program increases neurogenesis—the birth and development of new nerve cells—in a memory hub of the brain.".

The researchers found that middle-age subjects who had exercised for hour hour a day, four times a week for three months experienced increase blood flow in this memory hub, the dentate gyrus area of the hippocampus. The scientists correlated this with the rate of blood flow in mice along with the growth of nerve cells in this same area.

They inferred that the same type of benefits of increased neurogenesis in the mice was incurring in the human subjects.

In other words, consistent exercising did increase the blood flow and nerve cell growth in the critical area responsible for memory retention.

So what does this mean for you? Get out there and exercise or stay in an exercise. Regardless of where you do it, get off your duff and get going. One! Two! Three! Four! Get your body off the floor!

Tips to Impove Memory from P. Devipriya

P. Devipriya lists 10 strategies to improve memory at his blog site. I thought 2 of them were particularly useful yet unusual.

Tops among the list, in my humble opinion, is Believe in Yourself by ignoring negative perspectives about aging and memory. He mentions a study that found that middle-age and older learners performed better when exposed to positive rather than negative stereotypes. In other words, you are what you think!

The second valuable tip is to Space It Out - repeat your memorization of something you have to learn, spacing out the repetitions in increasing interval of minutes, hours and days until you've mastered the material. Recalling the information should be easier as your brain becomes more comfortable at retrieving the information.