Here’s an article from Wired about maintaining your mental fitness as you age. Cognitive fitness is probably as important as physical fitness for quality of life, if not more so. These days people are paying more attention to keeping their brains fit in the hopes of warding off problems with memory or other cognitive functions as they age. The article describes various programs and activities that are being developed toward this end. I’m all for keeping your brain active, and in fact I plan go on writing, and running this web site or whatever its later equivalent will be, until I’m a very old woman. However, I’m a bit dubious about making up activities to exercise the memory or the brain. Aren’t there enough mentally stimulating activities available already? Turn off the TV and read a book, or work a crossword puzzle, or build something with your hands, or listen to some music that requires a little effort to understand.
We don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time and money developing Granny Einstein programs when there are so many opportunities for using your brain. Three days a week I work out on an elliptical machine in a huge room at the gym with a bunch of other people treadmilling away, and I think sometimes about how exercise used to be a vital part of survival, rather than something artificial that had to be added onto our lives. I can see that there’s not much need for my meager muscular contribution to human welfare these days, so I can live with the artificiality, but with mental exercise, I’d rather beef up our popular culture to the point where it provides some needed mental stimulation rather than tacking on a lot of mental treadmills for people to labor away at. The joy of engaging your mind in something challenging might well be part of the reason that cognitive fitness enhances people’s later years. In all fairness, maybe that’s the goal for some of the programs being developed, but the article didn’t seem to say much about encouraging activities that are integral to a person’s interests and lifestyle.
