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A hand holding a brain-shaped puzzle with one piece missing and exposing a ray of sunlight, against a backdrop of trees in nature.

Do this for 5 to 10 minutes a day to improve your brain at any age, new research shows

Fast Company

Minda Zetlin at Inc. Magazine

Overview

Is there anything you can do to improve your own brain function in just a few minutes a day? New research suggests that the answer may be yes. Five to 10 minutes of daily brain training can significantly improve your brain health, no matter what age you are. And the longer you continue this daily habit, the more your brain improves, with no apparent ceiling on the benefits. Those are the results of a study by researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas Center for Brain Health who followed about 4,000 participants to see if a small daily brain training session could make a difference to cognitive health, as peer-reviewed by the journal Scientific Reports. After three years, the results are clear: It can.In 2020, the center created the BrainHealth Project. It’s an open-ended study that anyone can join via its website or app. Its purpose is twofold. First, it aims to help people of all ages improve their brain health with a combination of education (encouraging them to avoid multitasking, for instance), brain exercises, and one-on-one coaching for those who want it.What kind of brain training exercises did participants do? These weren’t crossword puzzles or the kind of fun games you might get, say, from AARP. These were exercises designed to strengthen your cognitive muscles. For example, the first exercise in the app is to take a short piece of text you are reading that day, go through it, and cross out unimportant information, as a way to filter out the non-essential and reduce overload.The project’s second aim is to measure whether this kind of intervention actually can improve people’s brain health. With that in mind, they created the BrainHealth Index, an assessment that participants complete when they first join the project and every six months thereafter, which measures participants’ thinking skills, connectedness to others and sense of purpose, and their emotional balance. All three elements are components of good brain health. The researchers saw marked improvement in Brain Health Index assessments for the majority of participants who took the training, especially those who did so every day.Read more at Fast Company

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Overview

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A young woman uses a smartphone and laptop to participate in brain strategy training.

A Novel BrainHealth Index Prototype

Adult participants 18 and up gained 5+ points on the BrainHealth® Index engagement in brain strategy training.