Lifelong Learning and the Aging Process
Imagine keeping your brain young! During the past few years many apps, games and online sites have emerged which promise to slow brain aging by using quizzes and brain teasers to help maintain brain elasticity, reaction time, processing speed, and overall brain health! Wow, what an amazing time to be alive.
Are you taking advantage of some of this great technology and research? I hope so. Some of the online sites and apps require a subscription, but many are free, and easy to download and open. Most only require a few minutes a day, a few days a week in order to help you see results.
How to Train the Aging Brain, by Barbara Strauch, published in the New York Times, is a great read, and illustrates how recent research about brain development has proven that brains "continue to develop throughout and beyond middle age." That's great news! So what do things like brain health, brain elasticity, reaction time and processing speed have to do with happiness and personal improvement? Well, there are many overlaps. As the brain ages, more complex connections are made, allowing for improved "bigger picture" thinking, oftentimes making a person MORE (not less) capable of thinking "outside the box."
Rather than buying into the belief that you are becoming dated, rigid and less creative and useful to those within your sphere, maybe this new research can help you realize that the opposite is actually true! As you age, keeping elasticity and constant new connections in your brain actually makes you more creative, more complex, and more beneficial to those relying on you at work, in friendships and among your family relationships. Go ahead and take advantage of your aging brain, and put it to work for you and those around you!
