Did you ever read an article and think, ‘wow, that was really interesting, I must remember it” and then a week or so later you can barely remember the fact that you read it let alone any of the details? Well, I have discovered a great way to embed certain things in your brain permanently. Simply follow whatever it is you are trying to remember with a life or death experience!

That just happened to me. I just finished reading a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine by Burkhard Bilger called “The Possibilian”. It was about a scientist called David Eagleman who was fascinated by – among other things – the perception of time slowing down at moments of heightened tension or drama. He had done a number of studies to try and understand what happened and how our brains reacted to these kinds of situations, and to see if in fact time did appear to slow down at extreme moments in our lives.

I could have saved him the bother because, today, I just proved it. The fabulous Shirley and I were driving back to San Francisco from the Russian River. It was a gorgeous early spring day, sun shining, hills a lush green landscape dotted with dazzling spring flowers. We took the quieter country road because we wanted to enjoy the scenery. A number of other cars had the same idea and soon there was a line of about six cars. As we neared a farm the front car indicated it was going to turn left into the driveway and slowed down, I was behind it and I slowed down. Unfortunately all the other drivers seemed to be too busy enjoying the scenery to notice what was happening up ahead because none of them showed any signs of stopping.

It’s a really rather uncomfortable feeling, sitting in your car, unable to move ahead without hitting the car in front, and seeing all these other cars coming at you very fast. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, except, sit, and wait, and hope. Finally, the driver behind me saw what was happening and slammed on her brakes, and that started a cascade of red lights and screeching tires as each car in turn tried to avoid a pile-up.

The last car in the caravan wasn’t so fortunate. It was a big SUV and it was hauling a speed boat and it was going too fast to be able to stop in time. So, instead of piling into the car in front of him the driver steered his car to the side of the road, smashing through the long grass and flowers, narrowly missing all the other cars until he eventually came to a halt, level with us.

A quick look over and it was clear the folks in the car were shaken, but not hurt. They were incredibly lucky, had there been a ditch they would have almost certainly rolled over. Had there been a tree or fence in the way, they would have come to a much more abrupt halt. As it was, probably the only damage was to their nerves.

It all happened in a flash, a matter of seconds, yet it seemed to go on for ages. I can recall looking in the rear view mirror and seeing the look of terror on the face of the woman coming up fast behind me when she realized I had stopped. I can recall the individual sounds as the other drivers all took evasive action. And I can still hear in my head the shwssssshhhhhhh sound the last car made as it raced through the long grass and flowers.

The New Yorker article describes that moment perfectly; “in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down…. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity.”

And it’s true. I don’t recall being scared as I witnessed all this happening, just very aware that this was something over which I had no control. You become almost detached, standing off to the side watching your life take a direction you hadn’t planned on.

Suddenly the lessons and conclusions of the article were firmly embedded in my brain, not in my short-term but in my long-term memory. The piece itself goes on to follow Eagleman as he tried to answer the question “Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed , or is some other mechanism at work?”

For me it was also a reminder that our lives are really rather precarious. Even when we do everything right, things may turn out wrong because we have no control over others. Their actions, as much as our own, determine what will happen to us. Our fate is in the hands of a man driving a large SUV, towing a big speed boat, who is not really paying attention to the world in front of him.

This time it worked out. But what about the next time. Or the time after that. And maybe the time after that the person not paying attention will be me. Will I be so lucky to react quickly enough to avoid a crash?

Hopefully this experience will make everyone involved in the different cars be more aware of what’s happening around them, what they are doing and what others are doing. Not just when they are driving but in other aspects of their life. Just to be focused on where you are and who you are with and what you are doing can really change the way you see the world around you. And change the way you see the people around you. And probably for the better.

As for the rest of the New Yorker article and its conclusions about time, well it’s fascinating stuff, and well worth reading.

As for me. I think I’ve done enough research for today. I need to go lie down.

There’s a scene early on in the movie “Defending Your Life” where Albert Brooks realizes he is dead and is being assessed as to whether he will move on to another realm, or go back to earth to try again. Rip Torn tells him that it all depends on how much of his brain he actually used, saying that most people only use a tiny portion of their brain. Brooks is stunned to learn that he only uses 3 percent of his brain. Three percent, says Brooks! “Yes” says Rip Torn “Everyone on earth uses 3 percent of their brain, 3-5 percent. That’s why they are there. When you use more than 5 percent of your brain you don’t want to be on earth!”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF897aNyxSs

That’s how I feel sometimes, that there are large parts of my brain that I’m not using. That half the time I’m kind of day dreaming my way through life. That large sections of time are taken up with my brain trying to remember obscure lyrics to bad 80′s pop songs, or the name of the actor who appeared in that movie that was set in Paris and directed by whojamacallit! You know the one!

Whole hours can disappear without a substantial thought appearing or taking hold. I appear to be thinking. But appearances can be deceptive.

What’s on your mind

And I’m guessing I’m not alone. Looking around me on any given day there seem to be an awful lot of people staring blankly around them. Now, I’m sure some are brilliant astro-physicists who only appear to be day dreaming, but instead they are thinking deeply on the origins of the universe. But I’m guessing most of the folks who look as if they are blank are, actually, blank.

What a waste eh! Think about it for a minute, or more. If we were able to really concentrate for extended periods of time, to focus on a task at hand, a challenge, to work out a problem, to bring an idea from a notion to reality - just imagine what we could achieve. No more hours spent in front of the TV watching shows that we barely remember the next day. No more days where if someone were to ask you “what did you do today” you couldn’t really answer.

We might be able to do wonderful things, create beautiful works of art, write wonderful literature, or at least witty and interesting stories. Or maybe our talents lie in other directions. If we could concentrate for a while we might discover what those are.

It’s all in the mind

Perhaps the reason so many people respond to the question “What’s new” with “oh, you know, same old same old” is because there really is nothing new. We’re all too busy not thinking to do something new, try something new, or even realize that we’re doing the same thing over and over again.

Charles Schulz

As Charles Schulz, creator of Snoopy, once said “Sometimes I lie awake and night and I ask ‘Where did I go wrong’. Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’

So maybe the solution is to stop. And think. Just think. That’s all.

Think about it.

Breathing is one of the most basic of human functions. In fact, it is the most basic. Stop breathing and everything else stops too – pretty quickly. We all do it, every single second of every minute of every day of our lives. But often we are not even aware of how we do it, or the fact that we are doing it wrong.

Breathing deeply

How can you breathe wrongly you are probably asking? Well, it’s easy. You do it without even being aware of it.

Next time you are standing in line at Starbucks or waiting for a bus or train, or in line at the supermarket take a look at all the people around you and try to notice how they are breathing. With some people it’s easy to see, or even hear, particularly with someone who is overweight – their breathing is often labored because every movement is more tiring, more taxing on their body. You can hear them breathe, you can see their chest rising and falling, as if everything is a real effort.

With other people it’s less obvious but if you watch closely (not too closely, you don’t want them calling security on you!) you can see them breathing too. It’s often quite short, shallow breaths.

Then notice how you breathe. You might be surprised to notice that you usually breathe in short, shallow breaths too. What that means is that you are not taking in as much oxygen as you could, or as you should. And over time that can have a profound impact on your physical and emotional health.

Every breath you take

One of the most important elements in yoga, perhaps the most important, is the breath, noticing the breath, focusing on it, trying to make it long and deep and smooth. Why? Because numerous studies have shown that deep, controlled breathing can:

• Ease muscle tension
• Help you feel more relaxed
• Lower heart rate and blood pressure
• Increase lung capacity
• Help people with respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema breathe more easily and reduce need for medication
• Ease anxiety

Not bad for something we all do every day eh! The problem is most of us don’t really breathe in a way that can help us maximize the health benefits of it. So here is one way to do just that.

Learning to breathe

1) Start by observing the way you normally breathe. You should notice that as you breathe in your abdomen rises and then falls when you breathe out. Watch this for a few moments to really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of your breathing.

2) Begin to deepen your breathing and extend that movement. So, as you breathe in do so more slowly and longer than normal. Let your abdomen rise as much as is comfortable, then as you breathe out slowly let it fall.

3) Don’t try to use or expand your lungs and chest while you are doing this, use only your abdomen.

4) Do this for 20 breaths.

That’s it.

Simple, but amazingly effective.

There's a book for everything - even breathing

A fresh breath of air

So try it a few times a day at first, see how it feels. Try it particularly after a stressful event, focusing on the sound and feel of your breath, and see how quickly it helps you calm down.

Then, as you get used to it, try it more and more often. Try it standing in line at Starbucks, or waiting for the bus, or in line at the grocery store. The more you do it the better you’ll get at it and the more benefits you’ll get from it.  It could prolong your life!

Our brains are funny things. They often take us down dark passages even when we are trying to stay bright and positive. It’s almost as if we don’t have any control over them; as if they have control over us. Maybe they do.

A good friend of mine had a pretty nasty scare recently. First he had a blinding headache that made him nauseous, that was followed by days of painful pressure in his head. I only found out about this later and my first thought was “aneurysm” – a blood vessel bleeding into the brain, not a good thing – and my second thought was “stroke” – not a particularly good thing either.

So, he went to see a doctor. The doc did a scan and they found what they called “some suspicious looking spots” inside his skull, close to his brain.

This is your brain on my blog

Playing mind games

Now, I try to be positive and think the best but try as I might my brain kept leaping to the worst conclusion. It could be cancer, it could be something invasive. Instead of waiting for the follow-up tests to show what it really was my brain kept running ahead to anticipate what it might be. Not in a good way, but in the worst way.

Why do we do that? Is it a form of protection, preparing ourselves so that if the worst does come we are somehow ready for it – and yet if you think about it telling yourself it could be cancer never really prepares you for the news that “it is cancer”.  Are we hoping that by thinking the worst then we’re more likely to get a better outcome – which seems a rather perverse way of going through life, imagining that “oh well my children will all turn out to be criminals or idiots or both” while secretly hoping by saying that they’ll all be Rhodes Scholars.

Whatever the reason, while I kept telling everyone around me to be patient and positive, my own brain was saying “oh, this can’t be good.”

Why do we fear the worst?

But guess what? My brain was wrong. The follow-up tests showed some lesions, foreign lesions in the brain, but they weren’t cancerous. Unusual, yes, but not life threatening.

Wonderful news. Terrific. Incredible relief.

It answers one question but it leaves a lot of others unanswered, such as why do we put ourselves through such torture when we don’t know what’s coming. Why don’t we just wait – worry obviously, that’s natural – but wait until we find out what is going on before going to DEFCOM 4.

I don’t know the answers to that. For now, I’m just terribly happy that all those dark thoughts and dark spots  were nothing. That what I feared didn’t happen.

Now what?

But what happens next time, and the next time, because there’s always a next time.

How often do we need to put ourselves through this before we find a better, healthier – but no less realistic – way of coping with moments like this. I wish I knew the answer.

Perhaps it’s the lessons we learn from such an experience.  The sweetness of life!  How very lucky we are to even have friends, family, to be alive.  Perhaps it’s about realizing the gratitude we feel that our friends are safe, for now, and our lives and the people we love  have become more precious – just because, my friend has a problem, but it’s not life threatening.

I guess if it was, we would deal with it, support him and feel the sweetness of life, too!  This outcome is more joyful!

A vital part of being healthy is not just having a strong, fit body, you also need to have a strong, tough mind, one capable of withstanding tough times and maintaining a sense of balance and perspective. Building a tough body takes time and a lot of hard work. Building a tough mind is easy. Just support the England football (soccer) team.

Another day, another defeat for England's World Cup team

When you are exercising muscles you develop strength by stressing the muscle; as it recovers the muscle adds extra fibres to get bigger and stronger. It is the stressing of the muscle that helps build it up. It is the same with mental toughness. You need to stress the brain, to go through tough times, endure hardships and adversity to be able to develop the inner strength you need for god mental health.

Now no one in their right mind – and this is all about creating a right mind – would deliberately put themself through pain and suffering and anguish even if the end result was a healthier, more durable mind. But the good news is you don’t have to work hard to get that. It all comes naturally to supporters of the England football team.

Every World Cup that comes around the England team – if they even qualify – go in to the competition confident of their chances to win the whole thing. It’s not surprising really. The English invented the game, the English Premier League is the best in the world, and English teams often dominate European competitions. The problem is, many of the best players on those teams are not English and the best English players have consistently shown they are not good enough when faced by the best of the rest of the world.

End Result; Heartbreak

Every time English fans go into a World Cup game thinking ‘this time it will be different’. By the time the referee blows the whistle for the end of the match they have come to the sad realization that it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Defeat. Pain. Frustration.

On the bright side that constant sense of frustration helps you develop the mental equivalent of a tough hide and that can be really useful in all walks of life.

Tough Times Breed Tough People

A few years ago a friend of mine was doing an in-depth series of studies on mental health in South East Asia as part of a Fellowship he won with the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism program. His Fellowship coincided with the 2004 tragic tsunami that killed an estimated quarter of a million people. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami there was lots of speculation that there would be tremendous levels of mental health problems in the months and years to come with people suffering from the equivalent of post traumatic stress disorder.

Village destroyed by tsunami

Several months after the tsunami Greg traveled to Thailand to see what kind of impact the event had on the mental health of people living in the hardest hit areas. To everyone’s surprise there wasn’t that much evidence to suggest people were suffering at dramatically higher levels than usual. It turns out that people in those communities devastated by the tsunami already had such a tough life that they were better able to cope with the tragedy. It’s not that they were emotionally unaffected by the loss of so many friends and family, it’s just that the day-to-day hardships of their lives had prepared them to endure something that would have left most of us a wreck.

An Easier Route To Toughness

The vast majority of people in the US, Europe and other developed countries don’t have any such hardships on a regular basis to toughen us up so we have to find other ways.

English fans have a cross to bear

That’s why supporting England is so useful. It will guarantee you heartbreak on almost every occasion and leave you better equipped for anything life can throw at you.

But just in case England one day surprises me and does win something I’ve taken out extra insurance. Since moving to San Francisco I have supported the Giants baseball team. They haven’t won the World Series since 1954. And while England only disappoint every four years, the Giants do so every year. It’s like having a refresher course every summer.

So even if England let me down by winning one day, I know my faithful Giants will take up the slack and keep me mentally strong.

I love to play squash. I’m not very good at it. In fact, to be brutally honest, I’m rubbish. But I’m enthusiastic and I try and I am getting better. Unfortunately the folks I play against are getting better as well so the gap between us remains the same. Here’s the proof - I am the one in the white shirt.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CyVCNRE-OA

I didn’t really start playing regularly until recently and most of the folks I’m playing have been doing it for years, they’ve played in college, they’ve had lessons. In short, they know what they’re doing. Me, I’m running around, flailing away while they glide around the court.

But for me none of that matters. I figure this is a game I can play for decades to come. Hopefully I’ll get better with time. But even if I don’t it’s still fun and it’s still great exercise. So, either way I win.

That same attitude can pay off in lots of different ways too, both mental and physical. We are all living longer than ever - in fact, a new book called Successful Cognitive and Emotional Aging says that two thirds of all people in the entire history of the world who have lived to the age of 65 are alive today - so we need to be doing things that mean those extra years are filled with good health and activity, not spent waiting in the doctor’s office or in bed.

In their book, authors Colin Depp PhD. and Dilip Jeste MD, look at the biological, environmental, and emotional factors that help people enjoy good mental and emotional health as they get older. The bottom line is that it’s never too early or too late to start working towards the goal of improving brain health (see, I just saved you $40, actually $45 including shipping!)

There’s no end of other studies that show that living a more active life is associated not just with a longer life but also with better quality life, mental and physical. That doesn’t mean you have to be running marathons into your 70′s - though if you do that’s pretty bloody impressive - it can mean just being physically active every day, walking, running, gardening, anything that gets your body moving.

The great news is that it doesn’t really matter when you start leading a more active life. Obviously the younger you start the better. But you can start in your 30′s, 40′s, 50′s 60′s, 70′s and so on. Ultimately the age is less important than the fact that you are doing it.

So how do you find the information you need to start being healthy? Well, there’s no end of books, magazines and websites out there willing to help point you in the right direction. For a fee. Some of them are good. Some not so good. But how do you tell the difference.

Don’t bother. There’s a much easier place to go to, that has excellent content, put together by the best experts in the field. And it’s all free. It’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site on Healthy Aging for Older Adults.

While the focus is on older adults the information is applicable to pretty nearly everyone. So check it out. Act on it. It could save your life. Or at the very least make it a longer, healthier one.

I love Shirley, but sometimes she does things that are not just rotten, they pretty much amount to cruel and unusual punishment. She is always singing or humming songs. Sometimes it’s a wonderful classic, but sometimes it’s a trite commercial that she grew up listening to. And sometimes it’s something as awful as a Captain and Tennille song (and if you don’t know who they are think yourself fortunate).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEh7_Ez9TfA

On those days I end up walking around with that darn song stuck in my head, reverberating endlessly. “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat land.” What the hell does that mean anyway.

Now she’s gone one worse. She recently gave me a book called “One Minute Brainteasers“. It’s a collection of puzzles and problems to test your IQ. It’s like crack cocaine for the brain. Once you start it’s hard to put it down. And even if you do, the teasers that you weren’t able to solve keep running through your brain every day. It drives you crazy.

For instance, there’s one section that has sentences with a blank in them and you have to find a food word to fill in the gap. But the catch is the food word ends up as a bad pun. For instance the sentence “Is — the list of the top ten Italian cities” is completed by putting in the food word ‘venison’. So when you say it out loud it sounds like “Is Venice On (geddit) the list etc”. Nasty eh!

That’s what I’ve been going through for weeks now since she gave me the book. It is supposed to be good for your brain but it’s driving me mad.

I mean, check out these sentences and see if you can come up with food words that complete them. Just to put you out of your misery the answers are at the bottom of the page.

1) The witness saw the —- up to the victim and stab him

2) The dog tried to —- his bone

3) Her Grandparents always used to give up meat from —- Easter Sunday

4) Even though Tom Hanks often acts like a —— Ryan always enjoys co-starring with him

5) If Rocky Balboa saw Alice B. Toklas’s significant other he’d probably yell “——-”

ANSWERS

1 - Mango (man go)

2 - Berry (bury)

3 - Lentil (Lent till)

4 - Nutmeg (nut meg)

5 - Yogurt (“Yo, Gert!”

I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to go to work.   Sundays, I use the time to discover “new” ideas, different opinions, cultural trends and business practices.  This Sunday, while reading one of my favorite features, “Corner Office” I discovered an important message.

NYTimes reporter, Adam Bryant interviewed Cristobal Conde, the president of SunGard (a software technology company) Mr. Conde is an IT kind of guy and his company is built on how to make technology available to financial, higher education, and government agencies.  Now you would think Mr. Conde is a techie freak but he isn’t.  In fact, the lessons he learned as CEO of his company it all about relationships and thinking.  Mr. Conde says he tries to take 1 1/2 hours everyday just to close his office door and think.  My first thought when reading that was, “Wow, an hour and a half? Where does he find the time?”  Think about it, or do you have the time?

Mr. Conde “makes” the time.  He believes it is so important for his company’s future that he takes time to consider, contemplate, goof off in his mind.  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about but it is important to take the time.  Mr. Conde says, “Sometimes it gets cut short.  But many topics or issues can only be dealt with in an uninterrupted format.  I worry about our entry-level people- they’re bombarded with information, and they never get to think”.

Well friends, guess what, there is a study out about that!   Yes, Stanford researchers have found that people who are multitaskers, and by that I mean even folks who are instant messaging, writing a report, and listening to music or taking phone calls do not pay attention, control their memory, and are easily distracted from any focus on the array of tasks before them.  The study was published in the Aug 24 edition  of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Their findings show that multitasking actually impairs the organizing mechanisms in your brain.

100 Students in the study were put though a series of three tests,  half were self confessed heavy multitaskers and the others were low multitaskers.  After the tests the researcher found that the high taskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant information because they just couldn’t ignore it.  Follow up studies showed that high multitaskers had a low performance in  memory  and organizing information.  They just couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. Plus, they didn’t take in enough information to contemplate with any depth of knowledge.

So there you have it, take it from a high tech guy like Cristobal Conde, if you really want to get ahead, take time to think, one thought at a time.  Still, how the heck does he find an hour and a half?  Maybe he’s lifting weights, or would that be multitasking?  How many tasks makes multi.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that.

Sometimes it feels as if you can’t turn around without bumping into another study that tells you how wonderful exercise is. Most of it is stuff you probably already know – at least it is if you read Health and Simple regularly – but once in a while you come across some fun new benefit that makes you think “cool”.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first.. Just Being Fat Increases a Kids Risk of Heart Disease
Now, we all know that more and more children are becoming overweight or even obese. Not just here in the U.S. but throughout Europe and other developed and affluent nations. Now a new study says the consequences of that may be far graver than we thought.

The study, in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that as early as age 7, being obese may raise a child’s risk of future heart disease and stroke, even if they don’t have any other risk factors for cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure.

That’s a wake-up call to parents, schools and pediatricians that they need to be more aggressive in working with kids with weight problems, to tackle them early and often so that those kids don’t grow up overweight or obese. The longer the problems persist, the greater the risk of future health problems.

Now, the news that fat kids start showing signs of heart disease early on is not new. But this adds an extra wrinkle. This shows that even if the kids are otherwise healthy and show no other indications of heart problems, just being fat shows they are heading for a world of health problems, unless we act quickly.

Move More Live Longer, and Healthier
OK, stop me if you heard this before. Exercise or physical activity is linked to a friggin’ host of wonderful things such as reduced risk of:

• arthritis
• falls
• fractures
• heart disease
• lung disease
• cancer
• diabetes
• obesity
• watching the Kardashians (OK, the evidence isn’t all in on this one but hopefully if you workout regularly you won’t have time to watch this dreadful, awful, scripted “reality” show) (note from Shirl:  I kinda like it…love the make-up!)

But now a bunch of new studies in the Archives of Internal Medicine show that exercise can have benefits in all sorts of fun, new ways

• Among women who are 70 or older, those who exercise regularly during middle age are healthier in many areas of health from less risk of chronic disease to lower risk of heart problems or dementia
• Exercise programs are associated with denser bones in older women. Why is that good? Because stronger bones mean less likely of fracture or other serious problems if you fall – either fall in love or fall in the shower
• Here’s my favorite. Resistance training can improve some cognitive skills in older women. This is such a cool study. The researchers found that doing resistance training just once or twice a week can not only improve attention and concentration skills among older women, but it can also improve conflict resolution skills. Amazing eh. Better conflict resolution skills. But then I figured that no one wants to argue with an old woman who’s built like Arnold Schwarzenneger so maybe that explains it. But what a cool granny eh!

If your idea of a good workout is driving around a golf course in a cart and playing a round of golf, say bye bye to your brain! A new study says to help protect your mind against the ravages of dementia you need to up the ante a bit. But the good news is you don’t have to do too much more, just get out of the cart and walk!

In one study, done by the lovely people at the Mayo Clinic, researchers found that moderate physical activity performed in midlife or later can reduce the risk of memory loss or other mental problems. At the other end of the scale, in a study out of the University of Washington School of Medicine,  researchers found that people who already have those mild cognitive problems can reduce them or even reverse them, just with some vigorous exercise. Cool eh!

If you want to read the specific details of the studies the research is published in the January issue of Archives of Neurology.

What’s important is that both point to the role that exercise can play in reducing or even reversing memory problems as we get older.  In both cases the researchers were focusing on a condition called mild cognitive impairment, that’s a kind of interim stage where you have trouble remembering things, or learning new things, it’s not normal but it’s not completely losing your marbles. While you might think what’s the big deal, the big deal is that every year around 10-15 percent of people with mild cognitive impairment develop dementia, such as Alzheimer’s, compared to only one or two percent of the general population.

So if getting out of the golf cart and walking can help save your brain, what the heck are you doing sitting there! Get up and move it.

High Blood Pressure, Dementia and Older Women

And if you are looking for another way to reduce your risk of dementia, here’s one, lower your blood pressure. A new study found that older women with high blood pressure are at increased risk of developing brain lesions that can lead to dementia later in life. And while this study was just done in women there’s no reason to think the findings don’t also apply to men.

Researchers with the Women’s Health Initiative followed some 1,403 women over the age of 65 over the course of eight years. At the beginning of the study the women all had their blood pressure measured and underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They underwent similar tests at the end of the eight years.

They found that women who had high blood pressure at the beginning of the study (140/90) had significantly higher amounts of what they called “white matter lesions” in their brain at the end of the study. Those lesions have been shown to interfere with the ability of nerve cells in the brain to communicate with each other. There is also evidence indicating that the greater the number of lesions in white matter, the bigger the risk of dementia.

So, want to keep your brain healthy? Then keep your body healthy. A great way to lower your blood pressure is a diet low in sodium, rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, and lots of exercise. Simple eh!