If you want to live long and strong, you’ve got to do more than work out your body; you’ve got to exer­cise your brain, insists Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg, clin­i­cal pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy at New York Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine. While we’ve heard for years that men­tal stim­u­la­tion can stave off demen­tia and Alzheimer’s, Dr. Gold­berg says sci­en­tists now know exactly how to keep our brains from turn­ing to mush – by stim­u­lat­ing the growth of new neu­rons and inter­con­nec­tions between them that boost brain effi­ciency. If you don’t use your brain in new and novel ways, your brain won’t be fit to use.

As the chief sci­en­tific adviser for SharpBrains.com, Dr. Goldberg’s site offers an array of brain teasers and exer­cises that improve brain func­tion. But online tests are not all you can do. Just do some­thing dif­fer­ent and chal­leng­ing. Get­ting out of your middle-aged com­fort zone is the dif­fer­ence in a high qual­ity of life when you’re older than none at all.

Keep read­ing more of the Florida Today inter­view with Dr. Gold­berg at Next Up, A Gym for the Mind.

You can also read our more detailed (and prob­a­bly more pre­cise) inter­view with Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Brain Fit­ness and Cog­ni­tive Train­ing.

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