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Submitted by PatientsEngage on 21 February 2018
Cooking s a good brain exercise to prevent dementia

Brain exercises are among the most effective non-medical approaches to delay the onset of dementia and can be enjoyable for the patient and more likely to be complied, emphasises Sabah Thaver, senior physical therapist (neurorehabilitation) at Nanavati Hospital.

Mark Twain once famously said, “Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.

This line at first sounds humorous, but it turns out to be the bitter truth of the lives of those living with conditions like Dementia. People who tend to forget the simplest of day-to-day things or ways of doing activities of daily living, which then in turn affects their quality of life.

Recent studies have revealed that the number of elderly people living with dementia is rapidly increasing. The risk of this disease occurs around the age of 60 years and will be doubled in every 5 years. The memory decline in normal ageing is related to the reduction of 2,000 million of neurons. The death of neurons in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus, areas that produce the chemical acetylcholine which facilitates learning and memory is closely associated with Dementia.

Now, the question arises –

  • What can one do to keep neurons alive to keep the brain healthy?
  • Can exercises help?
  • If yes, then what type of exercises?

In addition to good nutrition, your brain requires regular exercises to help protect brain tissue. "The brain wants to learn new things.” Exercise is fuel for your brain. Mental exercises can and should be a very enjoyable part of life. Almost any type of mental activity made be beneficial, but they should involve new learning and should be reasonable complex, varied and interesting. They should be engaged in frequently. They should target the following 3 things:

  • Memory
  • Reasoning
  • Speed of processing information

Keeping the brain active is thought to build reserves of healthy neurons and connections between them.

Here is a list of 10 activities** that you can try to keep your brain fit and healthy:

  1. Test your recall: Make a list — of grocery items, things to do, or anything else that comes to mind — and memorize it. An hour or so later, see how many items you can recall. Make items on the list as challenging as possible for the greatest mental stimulation.
     
  2. Let the music play: Learn to play a musical instrument or join a choir. Studies show that learning something new and complex over a longer period of time is ideal for the aging mind. Music soothes and tames. The types of music that show benefit are classical, ethnic, and jazz.
     
  3. Solve Puzzles: Any kind of word or number puzzles work here. The point is to continuously stimulate the brain and keep your recall abilities high. By rotating through the different activities, you’ll stimulate different areas of the brain. This, in turn, helps keep the nerves functioning and healthy. The puzzles also stimulate reasoning and problem solving functions.
     
  4. Learn to Cook: Take a cooking class. Learn how to cook a new cuisine. Cooking uses a number of senses: smell, touch, sight, and taste, which all involve different parts of the brain. Just like learning something new, a new style of cooking can help your brain. There are several ways this works. 
    First, you need to learn the style. Learning anything benefits you. On top of just the skill set, you will often learn about the culture, foods, and region, and this could stimulate you to learn more. Curiosity is a good thing.
    Second, you start to form new associations with food. A new cusine uses spices in a new way. You begin to learn and anticipate the way things will taste based on recall of past experiences.
    Finally, the wait to taste allows you to dream and fantasize. In dementia patients, this ability fades quickly. Stimulating this ability helps ward off problems.
     
  5. Exercise: Research has long shown that people who exercise daily are healthier, eat healthier foods, and retain their health and mental well-being far longer than those who don’t. Exercise does not directly work on the brain. It works on the hormones, blood oxygen levels, and nutrient flows around the body. With better control of the whole body, the brain has higher levels of nutrients, oxygen, and blood.
     
  6. Play with Children: Children have rich and vivid imaginations, which are directly linked to memories. By playing with children, you are part of their world. And this world is filled with unusual details you need to remember. But, more importantly, it has been noted that when an adult plays with a child, their levels of stress drastically decrease. Blood pressure, cortisol, heart rate, and perceived levels of stress are all decreased. Research has been done on the depressed and it was found that playing with children helps reduce the markers for depression. By increasing good moods, you help preserve your brain and its higher functions.
     
  7. Gardening: This is the one thing on the list proven to help improve mood and brain function. What researchers are suspecting is a combination of touching the earth, the exposure to natural light, and the satisfaction of seeing living things grow and thrive work together to improve the whole body. Gardening manages to stimulate your tactile (touch), visual (sight), and olfactory (smell) senses all at once thus giving you a wholesome and satisfying experience.
     
  8. Hand Eye Co-ordination: Knitting, sewing, crocheting and needlework are all ways to keep the brain functioning. The transition between details and large picture help the brain retain information.
     
  9. Do math in your head: Figure out problems without the aid of pencil, paper, or computer; you can make this more difficult — and athletic — by walking at the same time.
     
  10. Yoga: Used for over 2,000 years, yoga has all the same benefits of exercise, but is often much gentler on the body. When combined with meditation, as yoga originally was, it works wonders.

What Can You Do To Prevent Dementia. Click here for the Infographic

Meditation (or prayer) has been recently shown to be beneficial for many physical ailments. It is able to decrease stress, blood pressure, pain, inflammation, and increase healing. While not fully understood yet, research shows that the meditating brain is different than the awake brain. There is increased healing, transition between short-term and long-term memory happening near instantaneously, and alternative pathways for different processes forming.

In conclusion, it is important to consider complementary non-medical approaches to dealing with dementia in which case brain exercises are among the most effective. These are without a doubt a lot more enjoyable for the patient and therefore more likely to be complied with which makes them all the more effective.

** Until effective treatments are found, the most promising way to reduce dementia risk is through lifestyle changes. In general, what's good for the heart is good for the brain. The above activities are a combination of keeping a person mentally, physically and psychosocially engaged which can delay cognitive and behavioural decline in a person. But more research is needed

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