Ageless Mental Agility - Mind Games

	Ageless Mental Agility - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy Buy the book online: at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or Borders On this page: About the Book About the Authors Take a Self-test to determine your Learning Style Body Mass Index Basal Metabolic Rate Likelihood of Severe Depression. View an Animation How A Long Term Memory is Made How to Solve the Dice Roll Problems How to solve the House That Jack Built Errata for the book
	"The authors...have succeeded in distilling much of what is known about cognitive aging and memory into language that should be accessible for a lay audience. "The volume also provides some thoughtful and stimulating exercises and games that may be useful for older people in maintaining and enchancing mental flexibility and cognitive skills important in older people's daily lives." K. Warner Schaie, Ph.D. Evan Pugh Professor of Human Development and Psychology The Pennsylvania State University To order your own copy direct from the publisher click on this link. SYNOPSIS: Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could somehow slow the aging process, grow mentally younger, or amazingly, even regain our previous mental capabilities? Wouldn't it be great to be able to think clearly and not experience the frustration of failing to recall an important piece of information? We need personal techniques that we can implement ourselves to control and combat the aging process. This book is just what you need. It is designed to help you take charge of your mental agility. In Chapter One, you explore the concept of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning preferences. Several questionnaires help you recognize how you as an individual prefer to learn so that you can capitalize on your strengths and identify those areas needing improvement. Are these preferences we develop? Can we influence or change them? To answer these questions, in Chapter Two, you will learn how the brain works. You will discover how the brain develops as we grow and how different parts of your brain react while you are performing a variety of activities. Armed with this information you can begin to identify those external and internal factors that influence your learning efficiency as you read Chapter Three. A complete understanding allows you to control your own learning processes in day to day living and the learning you will be experiencing as you read this book. You learned in earlier chapters how exercising your brain can improve your intellectual ability. Chapter Four discusses various strategies which you can use to reinforce your current learning techniques. Applications and games using various strategies are provided so that you can practice new techniques and refine old ones to improve and maintain your mental agility. In Chapter Five, you read about the pros and cons of aging. This chapter expands on proven methods and strategies you can easily integrate into your life style to slow and/or reverse the effects of aging on your physical abilities, health, and mental agility. Some studies show that there may not be a decline in cognitive abilities in active, stimulated individuals. Intelligence test scores for these individuals may actually improve. For those individuals whose cognitive skills have begun to decline, K. Warner Schaie's Seattle Longitudinal Study demonstrated that a single five hour practice session could return cognitive ability to a level exhibited 14 years before. Moreover, this increased mental acuity could be maintained for years. Chapters Six and Seven will address these issues and provide you with many, many suggestions and activities to improve your mental acuity. You will learn and practice specific and detailed strategies to increase your education, keep you physically fit, increase your self-esteem, and keep you mentally fit. The younger you are when you begin to apply these strategies, the better off you will be. In addition, in Chapter Seven there are many, many games and activities to promote a strong, active, efficient mind and memory. All of the exercises, games, and learning strategies will directly affect specific areas of the brain and allow for growth and development of widely-applicable learning and retention skills. You will have an opportunity to take a pre-assessment test, experience a set of training exercises, and then retest to assess your gains. Keep in mind, pardon the pun, that this text is not just a book to improve your memory. It is designed to give you pertinent information regarding the quality of your life. Information such as: · why research regarding the effects of aging is, in many cases, seemingly contradictory · why certain aspects of your thinking processes are more finely tuned than others · how diet affects your life · how physical exercise relates to brain exercise · how declines in your five senses can make you feel uncomfortable and how you can compensate · how the suggested practice strategies, games, and activities are relevant to your life. You, the learner, will be guided through the identification of the learning style preferences and the mental processing modes that will promote the most mental growth for you. If you practice these techniques, they will make a difference in your life and improve the quality of your lifestyle. You will feel in control again. To support the text this web site has been set up with animations that are keyed to text explanations. Additional interactive games for mental exercises that are described in the text are also available on this website. Excellent teachers have been providing model techniques to support learning for many years. Recently, surprising results of brain research have infused these theories and techniques with valuable discoveries; you can refresh brain cells and increase your IQ through learning; you don't have to become more forgetful as you age. This book applies model learning techniques and the new brain research to myths about the aging brain. Reading this book can ensure optimal aging through life-long learning. Chapter One: The Learning Styles of an Agile Mind Discover how you capture, select, and store information. Chapter Two: The Intelligent Mind Find out how your brain processes information. Chapter Three: Teach your Brain Agility Engineer your own learning Chapter Four: Develop a Brawny Brain Build a mental agility exercise program Chapter Five: Support the Aging Brain Orchestrate the interplay between mind and body Chapter Six: Regain an Agile Brain Implement personalized techniques to redesign your aging process Chapter Seven: Enjoy Your Ageless Mental Agility Game your way to Ageless Mental Agility Top of Page About the Authors
	Kathryn Wetzel, has been married to Lew for 26 years. They are the proud parents of a very talented author, Shara. Both Lew and Kathy are engineers in Texas. A graduate of Texas A&M and Texas Tech University, Kathy loves to "figure out how things work" and collects little gadgets and toys that demonstrate engineering principles to show to her math students. In May of 2002, Kathy won the John F. Mead Faculty Excellence Award for her efforts as an Amarillo College Professor. Kathy studied the brain and how it learns for her Ph.D. and, therefore, was the lead author of the content for this book.
	Kathleen Harmeyer teaches in and directs the Simulation & Digital Entertainment degree program at the University of Baltimore. In June, 2005, Kathleen earned a doctorate in communications design studying usability in computer games. She has been married to Keith, a high school principal, since 1966 and they both are delighting in their daughter, Kim and their grandchildren, Maggie ( www.maggieruark.com) and Glenn (www.glennruark.com). They live in the Baltimore area with their tuxedo cat, Schwartz Und Weiss, but enjoy running away to the ocean for a few days at a time. Kathleen escapes in reading, soaking in a hot steamy tub, and traveling. She loves to play bridge with Keith as her partner. Kathleen's contribution to the book is the games and learning exercises. She also manages this website.
	Many people have asked us how we decided to write a book about the brain. Well, it all started out in the summer of 1995. When we met at a workshop we were conducting for the National Science Foundation about teaching students in undergraduate engineering programs, we started talking about how we as teachers wanted to get these same ideas across to the general pubic. We knew that with the proper information, people could be mentally agile and continue to learn throughout life. We tried to sift through the latest research findings and find compatible activities to demonstrate the techniques so that we could share this fascinating beneficial, and fun, information with others!
	Top of Page Test Yourself! Learning Style Learn what your dominant preferences are for how you learn best. Read the sections in the book referring to Learning Style and take this test to get automatic feedback. Body Mass Index This link will calculate your body mass index, a good reference for predicting overweight conditions. Basal Metabolic Rate Your basal metabolic rate is a good indication of how well you process the food you consume. Screening Test for Severe Depression This is a well known test and scale to give an indication of whether or not you are suffering from depression. If you have any strong suspicions that you are depressed, contact your doctor soon. Top of Page Animations How A Long Term Memory is Made Watch this short animation that illustrates how an impulse is propagated down a dendrite of a nerve cell and promotes growth of that dendrite towards another neuron. As the distance closes between the two cells, neurotransmitters are released across the small gap, called the synapse. The adjacent neuron changes its structure in reaction to the neurotransmitters. Permanent changes are made in the ends of both structures and researchers think that this is how long term memories are made. (Hum "Memories are Made of This" by Dean Martin while you watch!) How to Solve the Dice Roll Problems Use this set of animations to see how to solve the problems on page 235 of the book. Top of Page Mental Agility Home Page page maintained by kharmeyer update 05/22/06