Keep Your Mind Alive

To avoid dementia, exercise your brain:

The more time you spend on cerebral activities, the better prepared your brain is to withstand the ravages of age. That’s the takeaway from research just published in the journal Neurology that confirms—and helps explain why—people who habitually read, write, and otherwise process information are less likely to experience mental declines late in life.

The researchers gave elderly people questionaires asking how often they read books, wrote letters, visited libraries, and so on, not just in the present but across their entire lives. There was a strong correlation between an active mental life, especially reading, and strong mental function late in life.