Use it or lose it,” so goes an adage about the brain. As we age, regular mental exercise becomes necessary for maintaining cognitive functions such as memory, language, attention, logical reasoning, visual and spatial activities, among others. Popular types of this are puzzles, playing complex games, and memory- building activities. Here is a new and more effective one: Neurobics.
According to Lawrence C. Katz, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, neurobic exercises chiefly “present the brain with non-routine or unexpected experiences using various combinations of your physical senses — vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing — as well as your emotional sense.” The combination or association of the senses, including its emotional context, is considered as the building block of memory and the basis of how we learn. Creating novel associative patterns using the senses is, therefore, the core of neurobics.
Katz clarifies that the task of neurobics is not to create a super human brain that can memorize everything in the phone book. Instead, the exercises are meant to keep the brain flexible, agile, and capable of processing information on different pathways. Take, for example, the common problem of remembering names. While we usually use our sense of vision, we can utilize other sensory inputs as the bases for forming associations necessary for recalling a name, e.g., the feel of a person’s hand, his/her smell, the quality of his/her voice. If we do this, we can label someone’s name with not just one association, but at least four. Thus, if access to one associative pathway is partly blocked, you can tap into associations based on other senses and overcome the obstruction. Katz explains,“If your network of associations is very large, it’s like having a very tightly woven net, and the loss of a few threads isn’t going to let much fall through.”
The brain comes into contact with the external world through the five senses. As portals or gateways, people rely primarily on their sense of vision and hearing because they immediately provide plenty of information about the outside environment. However, the other senses which are equally significant — smell, touch, and taste — are less frequently utilized. The sense of smell, for instance, plays an important role in memory. According to Katz, associations based on scent and aroma form quickly and endure for a long time, not like those based on the other senses. “The olfactory system is the only sense that has direct connections to the cortex, hippocampus, and other parts of the limbic system involved in processing emotions and storing memories.” Realtors, for example, often advise homeowners to have something delicious baking in the oven when they’re showing their house to prospective buyers. In The Scent of A Woman, Al Pacino’s blind character created complex associations based on smell alone. Likewise, some companies have created aromatic packaging because of its powerful link to memory and emotion. They have included scents directly into cans and bottles, so a shopper can smell air fresheners or shampoo without opening the top.
In his book entitled Keep Your Brain Alive (l999), which he co-authored with Manning Rubin, Katz suggests 83 neurobic exercises to help prevent memory loss and increase mental fitness. Here are some of them:
• Use your non-dominant hand in daily activities such as brushing your teeth, opening the tube and applying toothpaste, styling your hair, shaving, applying makeup, buttoning clothes, putting in cuff links, eating or using the TV remote.
• Read aloud with your partner. Alternate the roles of reader and listener.
• Take a different route to work.
• Consider swapping cars with a friend who has a very different kind of car.
• Open the windows as you drive and experience the tapestry of sights, sounds, and odors that mark your route.
• Learn Braille or sign language.
• Bring a friend, child, spouse, or parent to your workplace. Everything you take for granted in your workplace is seen anew through another person.
• Turn pictures of your family, your desk clock, or an illustrated calendar upside down.
• Go to the market in an exploratory mode (with no list) and invent a meal from whatever you find that looks, smells, and feels good.
• Shop at an ethnic market or explore a flea market. Buy a few small portions of anything that strikes your fancy to use after as tactile, taste, or olfactory stimuli.
• At mealtimes, have everyone switch seats, which changes who you relate to, your view of the room, and even how you reach for water, salt and pepper.
• Close your nose as you try different foods.
• Change where you eat your meal, e.g., a different room, outside, on the terrace, on the floor.
• Puree in a blender one fruit and one vegetable that you have never combined before. Taste it and make up a captivating name for the new invention.
• Identify food on your plate only by smell, taste, and touch.
• Travel to new places and meet new faces.
• With your neighbors and friends, get involved in a community project.
• Take a creative workshop, e.g., photography, painting, music, acting, or whatever you’ve always wanted to do.
• Try a new sport.
• Communicate a thought or idea to someone without using your voice.
• Grow a garden.
• Prepare a meal and accompany with ethnic music.
• Place a cup with different coins and try to determine denominations through touch alone.
• Have sex (of course, with your loved one!). It’s the ultimate neurobic workout.
The brain hungers for novelty. Routine activity provides very little brain exercise and therefore reduces opportunities to create new associative pathways. Monotony in our daily life only generates mental lethargy and passive stimulations of the senses. The main point of neurobics is to do something that challenges and engages the brain through the use of two or more of your senses in unusual ways, not because it’s difficult but because it’s different from what you routinely perform.
In view of the growing number of elderly adults in the Philippine population, Miriam College offered a 10-day certificate program entitled “Fundamentals of Gerontology: Productive and Gracious Aging” last May. with Dr. Carmela Ortigas as program director. One of the topics discussed was brain health and fitness, including neurobics, which I handled. With the success of the program, Miriam College now offers a graduate degree program in family studies major in gerontology. Work and negotiations are ongoing to create a full-blown master’s in gerontology, in partnership with the Geriatric Center of St. Luke’s Medical Center and the Philippine Society of Geriatric Medicine.
For further information, call the Department of Social Sciences of Miriam College at 580-5400, local 2028.
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(Ronaldo A. Motilla, PhD is the head of Miriam College’s Integrated Lifestyle and Wellness [ILAW] Center.)