Maintain Your Brain With Mental Exercise

By Lee Bowman

Are crosswords and number puzzles, brainteasers or memory games part of your New Year's fitness regime?

Regularly exercising the mind -- along with the body -- can pay off with improved mental performance among people of all ages, numerous studies have demonstrated in recent years.

The first evidence that people need to "use it or lose it" when it comes to mental acuity was drawn from large "look back" studies involving thousands of seniors. After five or 10 years, when a significant number of the elderly subjects had developed dementia, researchers compared their habits with those who hadn't experienced a cognitive decline.

What stood out was that those who avoided dementia kept their minds challenged in some way -- reading, playing board games, playing a musical instrument, doing puzzles or learning a new language.

But those kinds of studies leave open the possibility that something else the seniors were doing protected their minds, or that people whose minds are sharper tend to do more mentally challenging things.

So more recently, researchers have set up more controlled experiments using specific exercises, often set up on computers, requiring people to recall words or numbers they have just heard, or reason through a "word problem" or organize a list of items into categories.

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