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157 of 165 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is something unique-an easy way to keep the mind strong, April 28, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness (Paperback)
Keep Your Brain Alive By Lawrence C. Katz,Ph.D and Manning Rubin Reviewed by Nancy Newman whose novel "Disturbing The Peace" is to be published by Avon Books this fall If you've been suffering periodic memory lapses lately and are worried a your middle-aged brain is turning to mush, take heart. Help is here in the form of a terrific little book called Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence C. Katz,Ph.D. and Manning Rubin. Based on the latest scientific research from around the world, the book offers a short explanation of how the brain functions, then goes on to describe a unique program called neurobics (aerobics for the brain) which can keep your mind healthy and agile even as you and your brain age The balance of science and exercises is organized and written in a way that let's you understand enough about what's happening in the brain without bogging you down with technical explanations. Basically the system uses the brain's ability to produce it's own nutrients that strengthen and preserve brain cells and applies that to the discovery that nerve cells in adult brains can be stimulated to grow dendrites with these nutrients. As we age our lives tend to become so routinized that we rely too heavily on only one or two senses and many pathways in the brain's circuits become inactive. As a result there is a thinning out of dendrites. Since these threadlike tendrils receive and process information from nerve cell to nerve cell, our minds can begin to feel sluggish. But according to the authors, this situation can be vastly improved by presenting the brain with unexpected combinations of the senses in novel ways, thereby stimulating it to increase the health and complexity of its dendrites and thus giving memory and mental agility a boost. The eighty-three exercises offered in the book are simple, fun and easy to integrate into daily life. Try brushing your teeth or buttoning your shirt in the morning with your less dominant hand. Scramble the location of familiar objects in your office. Take a whiff of pungent spices at an ethnic market. Make your way through your bedroom without turning on a light. You're giving your neural pathways a workout. Soon you'll be thinking up your own neurobic exercises. Growing older doesn't have to mean growing dimmer, say Katz and Rubin, not if you start living neurobically.
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112 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rip, February 13, 2007
This review is from: Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness (Paperback)
I'm very disappointed with this book. While it's based on fundamentally solid brain science, there's not enough meat in here to justify an entire book.
This book offers the following to strengthen your brain (i.e. build and activate new neural connections): "1. Involve one or more of your senses in a novel (new) context, 2. Break a routine activity in an unexpected, nontrivial way." Basically, by breaking the routine and forcing yourself to learn new things or different ways of doing old things, new connections will develop within your brain and create thought processing and longevity benefits. If you're right-handed, start forcing yourself to use your left hand (I was taught this aspect almost 30 years ago). Take different routes to work. Start using other senses to take in data. You see a widget. You normally recognize it as such and move on. Here, it is suggested to pick it up, feel it, examine it, smell it, listen to it and more connections will develop. Go out and socialize. Nothing challenges the mind more than interacting with new people.
O.K. This is all good, valuable information. But the proceeding paragraph pretty much sums it up. The other 100 or so pages in this book are fluff, with examples of achieving novelty. [...].
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91 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Simple: It Delivers What It Promises, January 5, 2004
This review is from: Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness (Paperback)
"Keep Your Brain Alive" offers simple, easy-to-maneuver exercises for ones brain. It is not rocket science nor do I believe it was written to prepare people for raising their bar on the genius scale. What it CAN do is keep your saw sharpened as many people go on the decline... not as one reviewer suggested, when people are already senile. I also appreciated the teachings in regards to growing new dendrites-the connective links which work as memory sharpeners - by taking simple actions like shaking up your breakfast menu using a multisensory approach to menu planning. My children, ages 11 and 5, enjoyed doing some of the associative games which will also build dendrites. Again, intentionally using these techniques and others in the book will do exactly as this book is intended: keep the mind fit... not create genius in 10 days or less.
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