As people get older, their health concerns usually increase. One of the major factors that threatens your wellness as old age approaches is the gradual decline of your cognitive function. This can affect your wellbeing in all kinds of different ways, such as by clouding your memory for everyday things or past events, leading to what people often refer to as ‘senior moments’.
It may seem like an inevitable part of ageing, but this kind of mental decline can have a very distressing effect on your personal life, social life and professional life. Many people feel that it is inevitable, but is this really the case?
Research done by neuroscientists is now showing that there are actually lots of things that can be done to help to ward off this phenomenon. Just like any other muscle in the body, the brain needs exercise. Doing regular mental workouts can help to keep the brain exercised, and to continue to form neural pathways in the brain. Without this exercise, the brain’s pathways can close down, but by doing the exercise, they remain open.
Through conscious effort to exercise the brain, scientists believe that the brain can remain healthy and functioning, even into old age. A company based in San Francisco has now taken this idea a little further and actually designed a specialist brain training programme, which is thought to help people improve their mental sharpness.
Lumosity is an online way to exercise some important mental skills, and they are integrated into a web-based programme and specially designed to let you improve your cognitive function, memory and attention skills as you plan. The programme also carefully tracks your performance and keeps a note of your improvement. Most importantly of all, it then modifies the game to ensure that you are building on specific brain strengths. Much like a good exercise regime, it grows in accordance with your growing ‘mental muscle’ and continues to stretch you at all times.