Boot Camp for Your Brain

Last week I wrote about brain maintenance, and it seems like I'm not the only one with gray matter on my mind. An Associated Press article about the growing market for "brain fitness" revealed that software to train your brain resulted in $225 million in revenues in 2007. That's a lot of cash devoted to your cranium.

It's not all academic stuff either. Nintendo has a popular game called Brain Age, which will supposedly "give your brain the workout it needs." It's also easy to jump online to play games for the brain -- or visit BrainBashers for a variety of puzzles and mind teasers.

But you have to do more than just play games, says Dr. Larry McCleary, author of "The Brain Trust Program". A multi-pronged approach to brain health holds that you should train as if you're an athlete: eat well, including appropriate nutrients or supplements; exercise; reduce stress; and watch out for the side effects from some medications.

And furthering the athlete analogy, Psychology Today advocates mental cross-training. Two key suggestions:

Laugh. Studies show that people are better at solving exercises designed to measure creative thinking immediately after exposure to comedy.

Limit TV viewing. In one study, people watching television had increased alpha brain waves--their brains were in a passive state, as if they were just sitting in the dark.

All this focus on your faculties might be faddish...but keeping your brain is shape sounds pretty smart to me.

(image by wetwebwork via Flickr, CC 2.0)