Review of
Four out of five stars
Holistic fitness for brain power
While reading this book I was reminded of the adventures of “The Man of Bronze”, Doc Savage. He is a fictional character of the 1930’s that dedicated his life to the fighting of evil and righting of wrongs and he is capable of great physical and mental feats. Unlike other fictional heroes, Savage has no superpowers; all of his talents are the consequence of daily exercises that are physical, visual, olfactory, mental and auditory.
The basic premise of
this book is that if you want to keep your mental faculties, you must exercise
your entire body, including your brain. It is also necessary to eat a
well-balanced diet and avoid the foods such as processed sugar and fats that
are known to be bad. Mental exercises are included along with those that move
the locomotive muscles.
Some of those
exercises involve identifying scents and noises, along with memory challenges
such as crossword and other puzzles. There was nothing in this book that is
new, there were news reports decades ago that touted the conclusions that to
remain mentally sharp it was necessary to “exercise your brain.” While
acknowledging that learning new things such as a language is harder when you
get older, the proponents always mention that the benefits from trying were
demonstratively apparent. My classmates and I were repeatedly admonished in
elementary school to eat fruits and vegetables, so those recommendations in
this book have been around for a long time.
Although the
information in this book is not new, it is still valuable. With an increasingly
more elderly population and consequently more people being diagnosed with
dementia, fear of suffering from that illness is common. While the cause of
Alzheimer’s is still largely unknown, one of the few preventive treatments is
whole body exercise and that is what is described in this book.
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