Customer Reviews

Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness

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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.

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. [...].

"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.

This book was published in 1999. Now six years later, the baby boomers are moving beyond middle age into their 60's! There is no way that anyone working as a professor in Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center could get away with selling a book founded on fluff. Katz has structured a daily self responsible system which transposes complex principles of brain development into an accessible experiential application for the general public. He has provided a great service in an age where Alzheimers is indeed a threat to aging. His daily guides *do* work and they do stimulate the parts of the brain and neurosensors to which Katz refers. My husband and I have had a great deal of fun with this book. We're both active and (for right now) healthy and happy baby boomers. Writing with the non dominant hand one day this week as directed in the book, was challenging. I realized the great strength of the large motor muscles in my left hand from playing the piano professionally. The primary challenge was staying with the writing long enough to move through the frustrations of not being able to write well. I became increasingly aware of the astute vulnerable weakness of the small motor muscle control in my left hand and wanted to give up but didn't. As adults, we are usually rigid when it comes to revealing our vulnerabilities. This book challenges adults to penetrate their comfort zones and not wait until there is a stroke or some other debilitating condition which leaves a person without eyesight, hearing, the use of a sense or a particular area of the brain. Katz challenges the adult to minimize the two dominant senses, the visual and auditory, in his daily neurobic assignments. He makes it clear how the less used senses in modern times have been blunted in the modern technological societies. Katz renders an expansive and interesting history of how the ancient (such as the Polynesian sailors) used the senses in ways that we no longer do. Their olfactory and touch senses kept the brain active. Thus, this assisted them in surviving the wilds of nature. The book is an interesting read and is sure to keep the reader plenty busy re-charging the electrical passageways of the wonderful gift with which we are all born, the human brain. As a person who has lived with a congenital hearing loss, I have long been acquainted with sense adaptability. Hats off to Katz for an accessible, intriguing, and fun book!

What I liked about this book and its system of neurobics is that i can strengthen my brain by doing such seemingly ordinary things as taking a different route to work. It's completely unintimidating...even fun. I wish I could find a diet system that was as simple as this seems to be. I have checked out the science and think this neurobic technique can do for my mind what aerobics is doing for my body.

I'm surprised at the response of some other readers of this book. I read the book, and I found that it offered a very interesting explanation of how the brain processes information.

A lot of the points that the authors make are perfectly valid. We live in an increasingly complex society, and, as a result, rely on a lot of routines (like taking the same route to work each day, buying the same items at the same stores each day, etc.) to make our way through day-to-day life. The down side of this sort of lifestyle is that these routines are brain deadening.

This book offers ideas on ways to break free of mind-numbing daily routines like using the five senses in new ways or taking unexpected approaches to everyday events. Sure, some of the exercises are pretty silly, and I can't say that I've embraced a lot of their ideas, but the basic premise behind neurobics makes sense.

I suggest you read the first few chapters on how the brain works and skim through the exercises--essentially use the exercises as a springboard to living a more active, engaging life. The average person will learn a lot about the workings of the brain and may even take a new approach to living their life.

I did a google on the concept of neurobics first. It's a concept developed solely by Dr.Katz with no actual physical evidence that it works. All the articles I found were related to the book, not any new research on this theory. In the opening chapters, Katz builds his case for how the brain wastes away in the absence of full sensory usage , how neurobics (could) make a difference and then proceeds to the excercises.

The exercises are diverse,cover a whole lot of brain estate and can be applied for any age group. I appreciated how they could be seemlessly integrated into the course of the day and week across varous activities. Except for the initial awkwardness , you need not spend any additional time doing them.

I applied some of the exercises and have noticed an immediate benefit in focus on habitual tasks. For eg. I used to bathe in a hurry and leave for office. Bathe so absentmindely that I'd wonder sometimes whether I washed properly later on when my mind caught up. Concentrating didnt help. Katz suggests breaking such habitual activities by using your less dominant hand rather than the usual one. It has made a great difference to me. This and other exercises do bring focus and awaken dormant senses while doing tasks.

The claim of long term memory growth is a moot point and one I'm not convinced on yet. Involving additional senses to remember stuff reads good in print, but not too practical in real life. I still can't remember a good joke to save my life.

But I sure am benefitting with other exercises. Here's one that I came up with. I have a habit of absently reaching in the fridge for a bottle of coke whenever I sit down with a book. I've switched the hand for opening and reaching in the fridge. Now each time I reach for an item, I pause and consider twice before taking it. You heard it here first!

When a 61-year old is given a book like this, one doesn't know whether it should be taken as cautionary or as caring. Putting that aside, I was pleasantly surprised to find an "aging" book that gave me new suggestions for combatting the erosion of my brain power -- something other than the standard jumping jacks and crossword puzzles and "make new friends". The idea that I can tap into the pharmacy in my brain, as the book describes, to stimulate brain cell growth is personally enmpowering. Some of the so-called "neurobic" exercizes are fun, some sound too simple, but overall they allow the reader to understand what's involved so that new exercizes canbe invented.

This is a great book. One thing I must say is that you must read the whole thing. The first time I read it I skipped to the exercises and missed the whole point of the book. One day I picked up the book and read it from the beginning. It was like reading a completely different book then when I started in the middle. The reviewer that said it didn't cover different types of thought probably skipped the beginning since he thought it was just a collection of exercises. This book helps you to develop different parts of your brain by challenging your brain. When you do routine tasks your brian is barely working, your cerebral cortex isn't even "plugged in". This books helps to strengthen your brain. I just bought 5 copies as gifts. I only wish I had read this book at 30 (I've only just turned 40). If I had been using this for ten years I couldn't even imagine (even with my new brain) where I might be now.

At first I felt the neurobic exercises were just too simple tobe really hellpful, but themore I read about the brain, the moreIunderstand how logical this system is. It just makesgood sense. The example of brushing your teeth with your other hand is what convinced me that I literally can exercise my brain if I just get up off my mental butt. I can almost feel the neural activity going on when I do the neurobics.

So I asked my neighbor, who is a neurosurgeoon, about the science and he said it's very consistent with the latest research worldwide. That said, I think the bookk offers a vallulable mental fitness program which I have embarked on.------ Does your brain have to slow down as your age? NO !