"As human brains age, they lose their ability to recall memories. Our memory peaks at the age of 30, and then it declines gradually with time....
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry and aging at UCLA, says there are ways that we can reduce the effects of this kind of memory loss by exercising our brains—training our neurons the same way that we can exercise our muscles at the gym
using relatively simple techniques. He distills the basics of these down to three concepts: "look, snap, connect."
- Look = focusing attention. The biggest reason that people don’t remember things is they’re simply not paying attention.
- Snap = create a mental snapshot of information you want to recall later.
- Connect = linking up those mental snapshots eg. "if I’m running out quickly and I have two errands, pick up eggs and go to the post office. I might visualize in my mind and egg with a stamp on it."
Source:
Neural Exercises Boost the Aging Brain This article is part of a series in the Big Think's
Month of Going Mental
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