I flipped on the TV for the first time in a month, hoping for a Masterpiece Theater mystery and what did I get? Dr Daniel Amen on making your brain healthy.
Dr Amen is an interesting guy and the things he has to say go well beyond the thought-based prescription on which I’ve focused. He thinks that poor brain function afflicts a large percentage of the population and causes our personal problems. An optimally functioning brain is essential for an optimal life.
Here with a synopsis of his six things to do to improve your brain function.
1) Don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs. Even moderate drinking—the amount prescribed for heart health*—causes your brain to turn into swiss cheese.
2) Eat a lot of vegetables and omega-3 fish and take vitamins. Your brain isn’t made of french fries. Drink plenty of water. Your brain is 60% fat and it needs to be hydrated. (Dr Amen recommends a different mix of carbohydrates,protein, and fat depending on your problems.)
3) Get a lot of exercise. This improves blood flow. (Dr Amen likes table tennis, which I find the perfect sport to play with my niece. It requires whole-body activity, hand-eye coordination, and interaction with another human. We always end our games in a laughing high.)
4) Make learning a life-long experience. (Dr Nancy Snyderman says education trumps every other factor involved in good health.)
5) Protect your brain from accidents. It has a consistency of raw egg whites and it’s encased in a bony shell with jagged edges, so if it gets banged around inside your skull, it will be ripped and bruised. Wear your seatbelt and wear your helmet.
6) Think intelligently and engage in pleasurable activities, like (safe) SEX! Kill the ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts) and, I’d like to add, correct the problems in your life that cause you stress.
Dr Amen provides much more detail on his website.
* Journalists and health professionals interpret statistics with the classic error of confusing cause with correlation. People who drink one glass of (red) wine a day are a self selected group. They are not the people who are too uptight to drink at all and they are not out of control bingers. They are naturally moderate. To learn whether a glass of wine a day really improves your heart health, epidemiologists would have to conduct a double blind study on a random sample of humans, both impossible and unethical.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Genaro // Jun 15, 2008 at 7:23 pm
I met Dr. Amen at a lecture he gave and then participated in his brain study of injured and uninjured brains. I learned a lot about the damage that can occur even from normal children’s bangs to the head – the kind that happen to most kids who engage in sports.
If you are interested in the brain and how it works, I highly recommend reading “”My Stroke of Insight”” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. It’s on the NY Times Bestseller list and it’s a wonderful book. Dr. Taylor’s talk at TED dot com is also AMAZING! Oprah interviewed Dr. Taylor and you can check that out on Oprah.com. And Time Magazine named Dr. T one of the 100 Most Influential people in the world. Having read her book, I can see why all the attention.
Dr. Amen’s book is brain science and it’s great at that. Dr. Taylor is a Harvard Brain Scientist, but what she writes about is the science and much more. She really cracks the code to understand how our brains (right and left hemispheres) work and she explains how we can get into our right brain and be happier and more joyful. Aside from any of the science, My Stroke of Insight is also just a great story.
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