Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness

This book was published in 1999. Now six years later, the baby boomers are moving beyond middle age into their 60's! There is no way that anyone working as a professor in Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center could get away with selling a book founded on fluff. Katz has structured a daily self responsible system which transposes complex principles of brain development into an accessible experiential application for the general public. He has provided a great service in an age where Alzheimers is indeed a threat to aging. His daily guides *do* work and they do stimulate the parts of the brain and neurosensors to which Katz refers. My husband and I have had a great deal of fun with this book. We're both active and (for right now) healthy and happy baby boomers. Writing with the non dominant hand one day this week as directed in the book, was challenging. I realized the great strength of the large motor muscles in my left hand from playing the piano professionally. The primary challenge was staying with the writing long enough to move through the frustrations of not being able to write well. I became increasingly aware of the astute vulnerable weakness of the small motor muscle control in my left hand and wanted to give up but didn't. As adults, we are usually rigid when it comes to revealing our vulnerabilities. This book challenges adults to penetrate their comfort zones and not wait until there is a stroke or some other debilitating condition which leaves a person without eyesight, hearing, the use of a sense or a particular area of the brain. Katz challenges the adult to minimize the two dominant senses, the visual and auditory, in his daily neurobic assignments. He makes it clear how the less used senses in modern times have been blunted in the modern technological societies. Katz renders an expansive and interesting history of how the ancient (such as the Polynesian sailors) used the senses in ways that we no longer do. Their olfactory and touch senses kept the brain active. Thus, this assisted them in surviving the wilds of nature. The book is an interesting read and is sure to keep the reader plenty busy re-charging the electrical passageways of the wonderful gift with which we are all born, the human brain. As a person who has lived with a congenital hearing loss, I have long been acquainted with sense adaptability. Hats off to Katz for an accessible, intriguing, and fun book!

This is a great book. One thing I must say is that you must read the whole thing. The first time I read it I skipped to the exercises and missed the whole point of the book. One day I picked up the book and read it from the beginning. It was like reading a completely different book then when I started in the middle. The reviewer that said it didn't cover different types of thought probably skipped the beginning since he thought it was just a collection of exercises. This book helps you to develop different parts of your brain by challenging your brain. When you do routine tasks your brian is barely working, your cerebral cortex isn't even "plugged in". This books helps to strengthen your brain. I just bought 5 copies as gifts. I only wish I had read this book at 30 (I've only just turned 40). If I had been using this for ten years I couldn't even imagine (even with my new brain) where I might be now.

What I liked about this book and its system of neurobics is that i can strengthen my brain by doing such seemingly ordinary things as taking a different route to work. It's completely unintimidating...even fun. I wish I could find a diet system that was as simple as this seems to be. I have checked out the science and think this neurobic technique can do for my mind what aerobics is doing for my body.

At first I felt the neurobic exercises were just too simple tobe really hellpful, but themore I read about the brain, the moreIunderstand how logical this system is. It just makesgood sense. The example of brushing your teeth with your other hand is what convinced me that I literally can exercise my brain if I just get up off my mental butt. I can almost feel the neural activity going on when I do the neurobics. So I asked my neighbor, who is a neurosurgeoon, about the science and he said it's very consistent with the latest research worldwide. That said, I think the bookk offers a vallulable mental fitness program which I have embarked on.------ Does your brain have to slow down as your age? NO !

Keep Your Brain Alive By Lawrence C. Katz,Ph.D and Manning RubinReviewed by Nancy Newman whose novel "Disturbing The Peace" is to be published by Avon Books this fallIf you've been suffering periodic memory lapses lately and are worried a your middle-aged brain is turning to mush, take heart. Help is here in the form of a terrific little book called Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence C. Katz,Ph.D. and Manning Rubin. Based on the latest scientific research from around the world, the book offers a short explanation of how the brain functions, then goes on to describe a unique program called neurobics (aerobics for the brain) which can keep your mind healthy and agile even as you and your brain ageThe balance of science and exercises is organized and written in a way that let's you understand enough about what's happening in the brain without bogging you down with technical explanations. Basically the system uses the brain's ability to produce it's own nutrients that strengthen and preserve brain cells and applies that to the discovery that nerve cells in adult brains can be stimulated to grow dendrites with these nutrients. As we age our lives tend to become so routinized that we rely too heavily on only one or two senses and many pathways in the brain's circuits become inactive. As a result there is a thinning out of dendrites. Since these threadlike tendrils receive and process information from nerve cell to nerve cell, our minds can begin to feel sluggish.But according to the authors, this situation can be vastly improved by presenting the brain with unexpected combinations of the senses in novel ways, thereby stimulating it to increase the health and complexity of its dendrites and thus giving memory and mental agility a boost.The eighty-three exercises offered in the book are simple, fun and easy to integrate into daily life. Try brushing your teeth or buttoning your shirt in the morning with your less dominant hand. Scramble the location of familiar objects in your office. Take a whiff of pungent spices at an ethnic market. Make your way through your bedroom without turning on a light. You're giving your neural pathways a workout. Soon you'll be thinking up your own neurobic exercises. Growing older doesn't have to mean growing dimmer, say Katz and Rubin, not if you start living neurobically.