Healthy Tips to Help Improve Your Memory

How to Increase Your Memory Skills

You should have left the house five minutes ago. Instead you're demolishing the place in search of your car keys. You finally find them (how on earth did they get there?) and pull up to the school just as the bell rings. That's when your six-year-old pouts, "Mommy, it's my day to bring snack, remember?" You race to the store, deliver a box of Goldfish to the teacher (no time to run home for the homemade treats you left in the fridge), and make it to work with seven minutes to spare until your very important meeting. The meeting for which you created a fabulous Power Point presentation, which is sure to impress your superiors. The Power Point that is saved on your laptop. On your desk. At home.

Wouldn't life be easier if you could only remember things better? Good news! You can boost your powers of recall and become healthier simultaneously.

Dr. Paul Bendheim, a renowned neurologist who specializes in memory loss and Alzheimer's disease says there is a way to actually increase your brain's function. Bendheim, an authority on Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, helped pioneer a lifestyle program called BrainSavers (www.brainsavers.com), which emphasizes nutrition, memory enhancement exercises and physical fitness as a three-pronged approach to increase and preserve cognitive skills and even ward off Alzheimer's. Could this approach help you with your everyday recall?

"Absolutely!" says Bendheim. "The brain is like a muscle that needs to be exercised to increase memory and cognitive function."

Bendheim recommends building brain reserve over your lifetime. Professor Shlomo Breznitz, founder of CogniFit, Ltd., concurs, stating that just like a muscle the mind requires exercise to keep fit and strong and that you must either "use it or lose it!" In order to develop your "brain muscle" you should embark on what might be called a cognitive fitness program.

Cognitive skills include decision making, problem solving, and abstract thinking. Increasing these skills will not only improve your day-to-day memory function, but can help ward off Alzheimer's as you age.