brain health

Good question.

Brain fitness seems like it should be easy to define - I mean, it’s the fitness level of your brain, right? But when I sat down to write this article, suddenly it didn’t seem so simple.

We’re used to thinking in terms of physical fitness - overall physical health, endurance, muscular strength, and so on. Sometimes, we describe more specific types of fitness- heart fitness, for example, which refers to the strength and function of the heart muscle and circulatory system.

But the brain isn’t a muscle…

…. and we haven’t traditionally considered the brain in our ideas about physical fitness. Some of us (ok, me) even had an image of the brain as sort of a inert lump that just sits there, almost like a gland that churns out thoughts, instead of adrenaline or bile, not as a muscle that might need exercising.

In fact, most of us haven’t thought much about the function of the mind and brain in physical terms at all (except for those dull anatomy lessons in school, of course). [click to continue...]