| The Memory Issue | Autumn 2008 |
Mind Games Word games are a fun—and effective—way to challenge your brain. In one study, for example, a team of researchers at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons discovered that elderly people who engaged in brain-stimulating activities such as crossword puzzles remained sharper for a longer time than those who didn’t. In fact, improving your vocabulary and memorizing passages from books are among the easiest and most efficient ways to enhance your brainpower. Memorizing a page of poetry, like solving puzzles, stimulates both the temporal and the frontal lobes. And researchers believe that if you challenge your brain by learning a new language, new synapses form, thus helping tone the very parts of your brain that can wither with age. The games needn’t be word oriented. Just as physical exercise builds muscles, learning and practicing new skills provides a neural workout that helps bulk up the brain. Neuroscientists at the University of Hamburg in Germany studied the brain images of a group of adults before and after they were taught how to juggle. After three months, the jugglers’ brains had increased in size in the area used for hand-eye coordination and motor activity—the occipitotemporal cortex. Playing music has similar effects. If you had never studied music and were to begin playing the piano today and practiced every day, the parts of your brain attuned to music appreciation and hand movement would develop and mature. As you struggled to play the correct notes, you would create new synapses. And after just a few months of regular practice, the difference in the size of the areas of your cortex linked with appreciating and learning music, such as the right frontal lobe, would be noticeable on an MRI scan. Physical play itself can boost brainpower, particularly if it involves learning and memorizing a sequence of movements, such as sports maneuvers, dance steps, and tai chi poses. The very act of exercise increases hippocampal levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that improves neuron health and helps synthesize more synapses. Playing with others—whether team sports or board games—involves social interaction, which is also linked with better memory. And don’t forget to employ games as memory devices: Use your imagination to memorize lists, make associations, and create mnemonics. Medicine is filled with mnemonics. To remember the superior thyroid artery branches, for example—muscular, infrahyoid, superior laryngeal, sternomastoid, cricothyroid, and glandular—some doctors simply recall May I Softly Squeeze Charlie’s Girl? So remember this: When it comes to preserving memory, kidding around can help you play for keeps. Majid Fotuhi ’97, PhD, is an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, director of the Center for Memory and Brain Health at Sinai Hospital’s LifeBridge Health Brain & Spine Institute, and a clinical instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School. His most recent book is The New York Times Crosswords to Keep Your Brain Young: The 6-Step Age-Defying Program (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). Click on Brain Quiz for a 204 KB pdf of a crossword puzzle reprinted with permission from Fotuhi’s book. Photoillustration: Stephen Webster |
relegated to the schoolyard. A growing body of research suggests that people of all ages can tone and enlarge their brains through play, enhancing their memories and staving off the eroding effects of aging on the brain.
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