Few days ago I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar on Brain Fitness to a group of LPs and OTs, Clients, and Caregivers. I thought of sharing a my lecture notes in our TST.com blog.

The seminar main points can be summarize as following:

What is Brain Fitness?

• Brain fitness is the capacity of a person to meet the various cognitive demands of daily life.
• The ability to assimilate information, connect relationships, and develop reasonable conclusions and plans.
• Having a fit brain means that you possess the thinking and feeling abilities required to work productively, sustain meaningful personal relationships, and achieve your goals in life.
• Just as a professional athlete sets various physical fitness goals, everyone gets to set their own brain fitness performance goals that can change over time at each stage in our lives.

Why is Brain Fitness Important?

• Brain fitness is as important as physical fitness. Just as you can exercise your arms, legs, and abdominal muscles; you can also exercises your memory, attention, problem solving and other memory tasks. As with physical exercise, exercising your brain can help your improve your overall performance and to feel your best!
• Studies have shown that “early detection” of cognitive (memory) impairment is a preventative method that can reduce an individual’s risk or rate of cognitive decline and/or dementia.

What is Brain Training?

• The structured and efficient use of mental exercises designed to build targeted brain-based networks and capacities.
• Goal is to improve specific brain functions, similar to physical conditioning training.
• “neurons that fire together wire together” – repeatedly stimulating/training a specific network of neurons results in new and strengthened connections in this network.

Our principal SLP Ms.Yasminah Abdullah can be reached at yasminah@totaspeechtherapy.com