Yoga For Improved Memory

A study done by Pailoor Subramanya and Shirley Telles a few years ago gave some interesting results related to yoga, relaxation techniques, and memory improvement. In previous posts we’ve talked about how stress can negatively affect your memory and how meditation can help reduce stress and boost your memory skills. Yoga has long been used as a relaxation technique, and several of the poses, including “corpse pose,” are designed to encourage smooth energy flow and a calm mind. The study done by Subramanya and Telles, however, indicates that a more active yoga routine may be more helpful for memory improvement.

There were two parts to the study, involving two groups of participants. The first group stayed in corpse pose (lying flat on the back, arms to the side with palms up, legs slightly apart, eyes closed) for approximately 20 minutes. The second group did 10 minutes of slow yoga sequences alternating standing poses, side bends, forward bends, and back bends, followed by 10 minutes of guided relaxation while in corpse pose. The researchers found that participants in the more active group scored higher in memory and attention tests immediately after the exercise.

While there are no definitive conclusions, there are several suggestions about why these scores were higher. Exercise – even slow and gentle stretching – increases the flow of blood to the brain, and a higher level of oxygen and nutrients will generally improve the brain’s performance. Another reason the scores were higher may be due to the use of guided meditation rather than free relaxation. While “emptying your mind” is a valuable technique for relaxation and stress reduction, because the goal is a quiet mind, mental activity is deliberately decreased. In guided meditation, on the other hand, participants are actively using their minds to visualize and make connections between ideas and images. This increased activity, combined with the physical relaxation of being in corpse pose, will provide stimulation for the brain, without stress.

If you’re looking for ways to gently but effectively improve your memory, you might consider trying yoga, meditation, and other relaxation techniques along with your other exercises.

Read more about the study here.

How Music Improves Memory

When we think about memory skills, we usually only consider the ability to remember facts, telephone numbers, dentist appointments, and the like – all the day-to-day details involved in our routines and our ordinary lives. Forgetting a doctor’s appointment is a small thing, if annoying. Ultimate Memory can help you learn the skills you need to be able to eliminate these small annoyances, as well as improve your ability to remember what you read, who you meet, and the information vital to your career and professional success. You can even learn the ways to help keep your brain healthy and active into old age, and to prevent or slow the natural decline many people experience as they grow older.

There are millions of people, however, who have not had the advantage of learning these memory improvement tricks over the years, and hundreds of thousands of them are in long-term care facilities, rest homes, and retirement communities, often unable to remember even family members. Some of this memory loss occurs due to Alzheimer’s or other age-related dementia, or traumatic injury or disease. As studies have shown, some of this memory loss is also generally due to lack of stimulation for the brain which, like any other physical system, will atrophy without regular use. Researchers have spent many years trying to find ways to help people suffering from memory loss get their memories back. However, an accidental discovery by social worker Dan Cohen may provide one of the more intriguing possibilities for memory improvement.

Cohen was working at a long-term care facility and on a whim decided to bring in iPods for his patients, many of whom spent the entire day slumped in wheelchairs, not speaking to anyone, and not able to remember their past or take much of an interest in their present or future. To Cohen’s amazement, once they started to listen to music from their teens and twenties – the music they grew up with – it sparked their interest and they seemed to come alive, suddenly able to recall the songs, the events where they heard those songs, and details of their lives they’d forgotten. What’s more, they were eager to share the songs and stories with others.

Cohen, in conjunction with renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, have spent the last few years working with patients, studying the effect of music on long-term memory recall, and inspiring scientists to look into the power of music and its effect on the brain. You can read Sacks’ book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain to get more information on how music and memory are connected, and watch Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory (the documentary produced by Cohen) to see the amazing results and reactions of people who have found their memories restored to them through music.

For more information on music and memory, read this post.

Exercise For a Healthy Memory

Researchers in Japan have been discovering amazing things about the power of exercise to improve memory and overall brain function. We’ve talked before about the importance of maintaining a healthy circulatory system to take oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and also the types of nutrition to include in your diet to feed your brain and give it the energy it needs. Now we’re able to add another reason for regular exercise, and that’s all due to a substance called glycogen.

Brain cells depend on a steady supply of glucose for the energy they need to work, but within the last few years another substance has been found to play an important role in brain function, and that’s the carbohydrates stored in specialized brain cells known as astrocytes, which store them as glycogen. This is a source of fuel that’s held in the brain itself, not in the bloodstream, and is available for quick transformation and consumption by the neurons in the brain when they need more fuel. These stores of glycogen go down quickly when you’re exercising, but then get recharged just as quickly when you eat after you exercise.

The important thing about this recharging, as the scientists discovered, is that the stores of glycogen aren’t just replaced after exercising, they’re actually increased by more than half as much again. That means that after you exercise and “fuel up” again, your brain has even more of the nutrients it needs for optimal functioning.

And that’s not all – with further experimentation, the researchers found that after four weeks of regular exercise, the brain actually resets its glycogen levels so that what was once 50% more than normal is the new normal. That means that if you exercise regularly (and replenish your body with food and water afterwards), you’ll have a constant and abundant supply of the fuel your brain needs. The studies show that the glycogen levels of the hippocampus especially experience this growth in baseline glycogen levels, and that’s the part of the brain that’s directly involved in memory creation and storage.

If you’ve been waiting for a reason to start up your exercise program again, we think there’s not a better one than this.

Reference: T. Matsui, M. Okamoto et al. Laboratory of Exercise Biochemistry and Neuroendocrinology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. Journal of Physiology (March 2012).

DHA and Memory

Research continues daily to try to isolate some of the factors that lead to loss of memory, especially as people grow older. One recent study focused on docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and looked at the relationship between DHA deficiency, Alzheimer’s, and a general age-related decline in cognitive function. While no results showed that DHA has the potential to treat Alzheimer’s, the study did find that higher levels of DHA were connected to better mental abilities, including memory and verbal skills.

The study participants were all around 50 years old, and while generally healthy individuals, they had each complained of symptoms of age-related memory loss. After about eight months of taking DHA supplements, the participants showed a measurable increase in their ability to learn and remember, and there were no negative side effects detected from their use of the supplements.

While the researchers used extracts of DHA produced by algae, there’s an easy way for you to get healthy doses in your daily diet, by eating fish. Salmon is an excellent source of DHA, and so are tuna, sardines, anchovies, and mackerel – you might already be using these as ways to get a good dose of omega-3 fatty acids, which is what DHA is. However, if you can afford it, caviar is the best source of DHA, with over twice the amount as salmon! Over-the-counter fish oil capsules are another alternative, but natural sources are better. Vegetarians should look for capsules containing DHA made from seaweed.

(Note: Before starting to use any supplements, check with your doctor to make sure there will be no harmful interactions with medication you are currently taking.)

Reference: Ryan, A. S., Stedman, M., Nelson, E. B., Rom, D., McCarthy, D., Yurko-Mauro, K., Salem, N., and Stedman, M. Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, Vol. 6 (November 2010)

Protect Your Brain Cells and Boost Your Memory

As the scientific tools we use get more and more sophisticated, the things we learn about the brain and memory do as well. For example, a recent study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proved that certain memories are stored in very specific locations of the brain. The researchers were able to stimulate the brains of mice that triggered the memory of an electric shock, and even though the mice weren’t shocked during this stimulation, they still reacted in fear as they re-lived the memory. You can read more about this study here.

The implications for these findings range from the use of artificial stimulation to recover lost memories to therapeutic treatments for disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where people have memories linked to certain events, smells, or sounds that cause distress. There’s also a more practical piece of information to take away from this study, and that is the importance of the brain cells themselves in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. If, as the researchers have shown, individual memories are connected to specific brain cells, it’s logical to conclude that loss of those brain cells will cause a loss of the memories, too. For that reason alone, it’s crucial that you do everything you can to keep your brain in good physical shape. Here are some things to do, and to avoid:

Eat a low-fat and low-cholesterol diet in general, but be sure to include the “good” fats that help protect the brain, like Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. Make sure you’re getting enough calcium and iron. Concentrate on including high-fiber foods into your diet to keep your blood moving so there’s no problem getting nutrients and oxygen to your brain.

Drink lots of liquids to keep your body and brain tissue hydrated, but avoid too much caffeine and stay away from high-sugar drinks entirely. While you’ll definitely get a jolt from both in the short term, the “crash” will often wipe out your short-term memories. Avoid drinking too much alcohol, which has been shown to destroy brain cells.

Exercise regularly so that a steady flow of necessary oxygen reaches your brain to keep it working well. Regular exercise will also help eliminate any circulation problems you might have, which also improves the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to your brain.

Tips and Tricks from the National Memory Contest Winner

Take two decks of cards. Shuffle them together. Now get ready – you have five minutes to memorize the order of the cards. That’s one hundred and four cards, in random order, and you’ve got to remember them in sequence. Do you think you can do it?

Miami, Florida resident Nelson Dellis can, or at least enough of them to win the 2012 National Memory Competition held last week in New York City. He can also remember sequences of 200 random words or 300 random numbers, and has a great memory for names and faces. He’s trained himself to gain this ultimate memory capability over the years, though he admits that before he started training, he “never had a good memory.” After seeing the impact of Alzheimer’s on his grandmother, however, he decided that getting top memory skills was important to him, to keep his brain active and healthy.

One of Dellis’ favorite memory tricks is often referred to as the “journey” method. Using this mnemonic device, you place the things you want to remember in order along a mental “path” that you travel. It’s easy to choose familiar locations for this exercise. Think of the rooms in your house, or a map you know well and can visualize accurately, or the route you travel on your way to work or school each day. When you have something to remember, especially in a certain sequence, you can mentally set each item at a landmark and associate the item with the landmark. Then, when you imagine yourself traveling the path (around your house, or to work, or from one city to another), you’ll “see” the items at each landmark as you reach it.

For example, let’s say you have a to-do list for the day that looks like this:

- return books to library
- buy beefsteak and eggs at grocery
- take coat to cleaner’s
- meet Taylor for lunch

First, put the tasks in a logical order – you’ll want to buy the groceries last, and it will be more efficient to minimize the distance you have to travel between spots. We’ll say the library and the restaurant are close together, and the cleaner’s is farther away from your house than the grocery.

Next, pick the “map” that you’ll visualize. Most people are familiar with the shape of the North and South American continents, so let’s place the first task (“take coat to cleaner’s”) at the top, in Canada, where it’s very cold in the winter – a logical place for a coat. Right below, we have the United States; we’ll put your library books here, resting them on the horizontal borders between many of the states, like shelves. You and Taylor enjoy the spicy food of Mexico, so write down the time and place of your meeting anywhere from Acapulco to Zamora. Finally, put your groceries in South America. You might associate beefsteak with the cattle grazing on the pampas of Argentina, and perhaps the eggs are resting in the nests of the many birds in the Amazonian jungle.

This might seem like a time-consuming and elaborate way to remember things, but keep in mind that (1) visual images are easy to remember, the more unusual the better; and (2) the more you do this visualization, the quicker it will get.

For more tricks from the memory champion, listen to an interview here.

Milk Builds Brains As Well As Bones

A 2011 collaborative study between researchers in Australia and the United States found an interesting connection between dairy products and brain health. After reviewing the diets of over 1,000 adults, the researchers found that people who regularly consume milk, cheese, and yogurt score higher on tests of mental alertness and memory skills. The physical impact of this dairy-rich diet also showed up in scans of the patients’ brains, which showed less shrinkage in those participants who had a higher level of “good fat” in their blood, and that dairy products are a good source of this “good fat.”

The reason behind this result, and the link between the mental and physical effects on the brain, is explained by looking at the composition of the brain itself. Over half of your brain is made up of fat cells, and in particular the myelin sheaths that connect the brain cells and protect them. These myelin sheaths are also crucial components in the way the brain cells communicate, so any damage will impact your ability to learn and remember.

The effect of dairy-based diets in the study group can also be highlighted by looking at the test scores that were “significantly higher” in those people who ate more dairy products. They scored better in both memory and skills tests, and the combination of better brain-cell communication and less brain shrinkage indicates that a diet including dairy will also help prevent age-related memory loss.

So pour a glass of milk, slice a wedge of Cheddar, or add yogurt to your morning granola, and you’ll give your brain a boost it will benefit from for days and years to come.

Reference: International Dairy Journal, January 2012 (Vol 22 Issue 1)

Sleep or Caffeine: Which is Better for Memory?

A 2008 study looked into the effects of caffeine on memory, and compared it to the effects of taking a nap instead. If you’re one of the many people who rely on a morning (or afternoon) jolt of coffee to get your brain moving, you might be surprised at what the researchers found.

Caffeine has long been used to stimulate the mental processes, whether consumed as coffee, tea, chocolate, or the modern-day “energy drinks” that can contain several times the caffeine levels of coffee. Most people drink some sort of caffeinated beverage to wake up, and in this fast-paced world we live in, caffeine is often a substitute for sleep. When it comes to memory, it’s not a good substitute at all.

As we’ve discussed before, getting enough sleep is extremely important for your brain and memory, and ensures that you’ll have enough time to unconsciously process and store the information from the day’s input. What this recent study shows is that even a short nap can give the brain the time it needs to do that processing and storage, which means that it will be easier to remember things. While caffeine definitely makes you feel sharper in the moment, it’s not a guarantee that you’ll remember what it is your studying during that time period.

The researchers found that people in their study who had a nap after a learning task could remember and perform that task better than those who had a dose of caffeine beforehand. Given these results, it appears that if you’re headed into a university class or a departmental meeting, rather than trying to perk up your brain with a cup of coffee, you’d do better to focus as much as possible on the information being presented, and then head to a quiet place to take a short nap. Since your unconscious picks up as much information as your conscious mind, you don’t need to worry about missing too many details – though of course it’s a good idea to take notes, which both increases your ability to remember and gives you a quick review sheet to read after your nap to consolidate the information in your brain.

Do you think we might see a “Sleepbucks” store on every corner in the future?

References: Mednick, S., Cai, D., Kanady, J., and Drummond, S. University of California, San Diego. Behavioral Brain Research (2008).

The Memory-Boosting Compound Luteolin

In July 2010, The Journal of Nutrition published a study showing that inflammation in the brain is reduced by luteolin, a flavonoid present in foods like carrots, oranges, celery, and green pepper. This is important, because brain inflammation is responsible for a decrease in brain cell activity. What’s worse, this inflammation actually causes the death of brain cells. Obviously, if you have fewer cells, your brain and your memory will not be working at their optimal level.

The study showed that mice who received luteolin supplements had better spatial working memory, which means that they were able to remember where things were, and also much less inflammation in their hippocampal region. While luteolin isn’t the only anti-aging and anti-inflammatory compound out there, the results of this study are significant. In the older mice who were tested as part of this study, there was a decrease in cell death and inflammation, indicating that luteolin can actually repair age-related damage to the brain.

Here’s a recipe for a memory-boosting luteolin-rich salad:

four carrots, shredded
three celery stalks, sliced thin
one large green pepper, seeded and diced
juice of one orange
two tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon each of minced fresh rosemary, thyme, and oregano
salt to taste

Mix the carrots, celery, and green pepper together in a bowl. Whisk the orange juice, oil, herbs, and salt together and toss with the mixed vegetables. Serves 2 as a healthy lunch you’ll remember for a long time!

For the full study results, click here.

Five Ways to Improve Sleep – and Improve Memory

Although our physical bodies and our conscious minds are (mostly) still when we sleep, there’s still a great deal of activity going on, and that activity plays a crucial role in maintaining health and memory. Over the course of a night’s sleep, our brains process and store the information we took in during the day, our bodies repair damaged cells and flush out toxins, and our systems recalibrate in order to get ready for the next day’s work. It’s important that we get enough sleep to go through all of the phases of sleep – slow-wave sleep and deep sleep, in alternating patterns – because different unconscious processes occur during those different stages of sleep. Of particular significance to keeping a good memory, it’s during sleep that much of the repair of brain cells occurs, and also when growth hormones are released that stimulate the production of new brain tissue and neurons. In addition, the increased brainwave activity during deep sleep allows the brain time to sort through, categorize, compartmentalize, and tag information for later recall. One of the leading causes of poor memory is a lack of adequate sleep – something many students know first hand. If you’re not sleeping well, and are suffering from a poor memory as a result, make note of these five tips for healthy sleep:

Avoid late-night meals. Eating a heavy meal right before you sleep may cause indigestion, which will keep you awake. Try to eat earlier in the evening.

Keep your room dark. Most people are naturally drawn to follow the cycle of day and night, and if your room is too bright, your body will be confused and think it should still be awake and alert. A dark room encourages sleep.

Get comfortable. Adjust the room’s temperature so that you’re neither too cold nor overheated. Because your body’s temperature naturally goes down when you sleep, keep extra coverings handy.

Relax. If you get into bed while still fretting over a work problem, you’ll find it harder to get to sleep. Practice meditation, listen to soothing music, or watch a favorite television show to get your mind off your problems.

Eliminate stimulants. Be careful that you don’t drink caffeine or alcohol right before going to bed. The first will keep you up, and the second will wake you up in the middle of the night.

« Previous Entries | Next Page »