but if continually fine-tuned, it should also
be getting more efficient. And smarter, too.
In healthy brain aging, your goal should
not be to look for the mythical fountain-ofyouth elixir to return to your younger
brain state. Rather, the goal should be to
maintain and strengthen your brain’s
robustness.
Keep reminding yourself, if you do not work
to improve your brain, you will go backward. For your brain’s well-being, you want
to keep progressing. If I were to take ten or
twenty years off your brain, you would beg
me to have the years back because they are
packed with such rich developments, that
is, if you properly fostered your brain fitness. If you think brains are optimally performing in twenty-something-year-olds,
have them make a decision or two for you.
Even more exciting is the news that brain
aging can have some clear advantages when
compared to the young adult brain. There
are more decisive pieces to your brain puzzle as you age than speed and amount of
fact recall. Certain pivotal brain functions
do not have to get slowly worse and can
even get better.
As a thriving society, we must change the
negative framing of brain aging and instead
harness the full frontal potential of our
brain’s capacity throughout life (where
more wrinkles on the brain, by the way, are
a good thing since brain wrinkles indicate a
larger cortex — gray matter!) and more
fully strive to achieve the brain potential
that is yet to come.
To learn more about healthy brain habits
to improve your brain health at any age,
check out Dr. Chapman’s book, Make Your
Brain Smarter or visit www.centerforbrainhealth.org.
Sandra Bond Chapman, Ph.D. is the founder and chief director of
the Center for BrainHealth, a Distinguished University Professor at
The University of Texas at Dallas and author of Make Your Brain
Smarter: Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy and Focus.
Dr. Chapman has a remarkable gift for translating the complex world
of cognitive neuroscience into easy-to-understand language. For the
last 30 years, she has focused her research on how to make the
human brain smarter and healthier. With more than 40 funded
research grants and more than 200 publications to her credit, she is
recognized as a leading thinker, transforming popular misconceptions about what smart is, when
we are the smartest, and how to repair the brain after injury or in the face of disease. Her approach
to the science of thinking smarter aims to help people of all ages improve creative and critical thinking, incite innovation and maximize brain performance throughout life.
For more information visit centerforbrainhealth.org.
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