A new kind of exercise

Brain fitness program A new research suggested that brain exercise combined with healthy lifestyle can improve memory for elder people. The study found out that 115 participants of retirement communities that followed brain fitness program, which includes memory training, physical activity, and healthier diet; proved that their word recognition and recall were significantly improving after following brain fitness program for 6 weeks. This brain fitness program was conducted by Gary Small, MD, professor of aging at the University of California–Los Angeles and director of the UCLA Longevity Center and Karen Miller, PhD, associate clinical professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

This brain fitness program uses a standardized curriculum which consist of brain exercises for correlation and visual descriptions, instruction on brain diet and stress reduction, physical activity, and even assigned memory exercises that can be done at home. Previously, several places such as the UCLA campus and senior centers have been offered this brain fitness program, but the research was the first research that was conducted in retirement neighborhood.

The result revealed that the program participants had major progress on identification memory for word pairs and retention of verbal list learning. Also, it is believed that they have better memory that is implied from their increasing retrospective functioning scores. These findings suggest that the brain fitness program is able to enhance new verbal information encoding and recalling, as well as the memory ability self-perception of elder people.

Regarding the result, this brain fitness program may have a chance to be applied in real-world setting. The people’s need for an affordable and sustainable memory program for some time makes this program to be their best option. The brain fitness program can be the cost-effective method of dealing some memory-related problems of healthy elder people.