It turns out that a part of stimulating the brain involves providing it with rewards, which the exercises provide in the form of animations, sound and visual “candy” for good performance and other abstract inducements. The entire exercise is done before a computer and requires little typing but instead, the use of a mouse for giving responses.

For me, the results were breathtaking. Not only has my memory improved, but my ability to organize and understand things like speech in crowded rooms has gotten better. The brain plasticity concept covers a person’s adjustment of how to recognize other people’s speech patterns and our ability to understand what they are saying. But again, it’s not accomplished without considerable commitment and effort; just like a physical workout.

The process begins early, at about 20, and cognitive ability, thinking, remembering, reasoning and even listening, seeing and recognizing all begin to slow down; some of us more gracefully than others, until at age 50 to 60 most begin to notice it’s not all there any more.

Recently, medical science has been studying how the brain handles the aging process and indeed how the brain reacts to the events, which make up one’s experience. Over the last 10 years, neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, has been enormously expanded, from the dynamics of individual nerve cells and their molecular constituents to imaging representations of perceptual and motor tasks in the brain. The result has been a recognition that the brain, the center of guidance for the activity of all sentient life forms, is more complex and adaptable than ever before realized. Neuroscience is at the frontier of investigation of the brain and mind. The study of the brain is becoming the cornerstone in understanding how we perceive and interact with the external world and, in particular, how human experience and human biology influence each other.

And, of course, neuroscientists studying the ability of different elements of the brain to adapt to a person’s unique experience, a process called brain plasticity, have applied their knowledge to develop some rather remarkable improvements in brain function for people of every age, even those whose mental ability has degraded as a result of old age, a condition called senile dementia.

Now, several organizations have developed procedures and exercises, which have led to remarkable improvements in brain function for people of any age. These companies have made commercial use of recent discoveries in brain plasticity to develop brain exercises that improve memory, speech recognition and concentration. The two organizations which seem to have the best credentials and most advanced tools for consumers are Posit Science, which promotes a program called the Brain Fitness Program as seen recently on public broadcasting stations, and Lumos Labs, producers of brain exercise games called luminosity.

For the most part, these programs are designed to be easy-to-use and to fit into one’s lifestyle. Regular use can range from a few minutes a day to as much time as a user prefers. Over a period of about a month, having completed about half of the Posit Science program of 40 sessions, each taking about an hour and a half, I find that one session averages one to one and a half hours. The program, although not difficult, is not done without a decision to make a healthy commitment of time and effort. I found that many of the exercises are fun and interesting, but some are boring and sometimes frustrating. They are, however, easy to interrupt and rejoin; so taking a break is often a help. It turns out that a part of stimulating the brain involves providing it with rewards, which the exercises provide in the form of animations, sound and visual “candy” for good performance and other abstract inducements. The entire exercise is done before a computer and requires little typing but instead, the use of a mouse for giving responses.

For me, the results were breathtaking. Not only has my memory improved, but my ability to organize and understand things like speech in crowded rooms has gotten better. The brain plasticity concept covers a person’s adjustment of how to recognize other people’s speech patterns and our ability to understand what they are saying. But again, it’s not accomplished without considerable commitment and effort; just like a physical workout.

I’m so convinced that the program will do many of us some good that arrangements are being made to provide copies of the program to the Community Center and Elder Affairs as well as the Library.