If you could, you would. You can, but prefer not to know it?

More than any other organ, your brain is up to you. You are what you think, not just what you eat. Here’s some food for thought:

Design your Mind

Setting cognitive and behavioral goals raises challenging and worthy questions: What do you want from your brain? Will you know it when you achieve it?

To attain the brain of our choosing, we must understand our selves and current abilities. Introspection and curiosity are helpful if they trigger and sustain the effort to enrich the mind. However, objective information which leads to informed assessment of brain function is often lacking.

Mind your Brain

Honesty. Openness. Self-awareness.

Irrefutable virtues, but in practice most people fall short. Few regularly appraise their brain skills; even so, the ability to accurately judge one’s own mental performance is not guaranteed. I believe the first step to minding the brain is shedding hang-ups while offering and soliciting frank feedback from family and close confidants. In the clinical setting, routine cognitive screening and “mental check ups” are not currently practiced, in part due to time constraints and limited utility of traditional paper-and-pencil tests. From a public health perspective, the U.S. Preventative Task Force reviewed Read the rest of this entry »

A dreaded diagnosis, that dimmed and dooming dilemma. Feared, sometimes fought, too often forgotten. It is the grayest, ghastliest elephant in the room: dementia.

What is dementia? I, like many others who dedicate their professional efforts to its study and treatment, have no good answer. I believe we are lost in our lexicon, trying to define a brain state so vexing and elusive it drives us out of our minds.

I hope we can do better, and I am not alone. In a sensitive and forward-looking editorial entitled Dementia: A Word to be Forgotten, Drs. Trachtenberg and Trojanowski of the University of Pennsylvania argue that alternate terms are more appropriate for research, clinical, and everyday settings. From scientific and biological perspectives, dementia is unspecific and subjective. Within the walls of the physician’s office, delivering the diagnosis of dementia can erect unintended walls around patients and families; vulnerable individuals, assuming that the “cruel connotations in the lay language” actually apply to them, are unnecessarily isolated. Read the rest of this entry »

Cognitive training (the basis for what we call “brain fitness” these days) has a wide array of applications. The most recent one, which is capturing public’s imagination, monopolizing media coverage, and creating certain confusion, is Healthy Brain Aging. We are fortunate to have Dr. Joshua Steinerman, one of our new Expert Contributors, offer today his great voice to this conversation. Enjoy!

- Alvaro
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Minding the Aging Brain

– By Joshua R. Steinerman, M.D.

Scientists, philosophers, artists, and experts from all fields of human endeavor lament: it ain’t easy getting older. It? Do they refer to frailty and disability? To bodily disease? To life at its essence?

It’s all in your head

The mind is not set in stone, but it is encased by bone. It’s really all about the brain, the hyphen in the mind-body conundrum. That squishy gray neuronal jungle is the interface between internal life and environmental sensations and stimulation. As expected, the brain shows signs of aging just as a wrinkled brow, a stooped posture, or an arthritic finger might. The most common brain changes observed in aging and in age-associated neuropsychiatric disease include:

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