A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
IS YOUR BRAIN IN GOOD SHAPE?
Dr Sanjay Gupta is well-known as CNN’s chief medical correspondent.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
We all have those days when our brains feel a tad under the weather. Brain freeze, foggy brain, we use these euphemisms to joke about why we can’t remember why we walked into a room in the first place.
Or when we can’t recall the name of a favourite actor. Or a common word escapes us mid-sentence.
Are all these signs of ageing, an inexorable decline of mental abilities that we have to accept, make the best of? Or is there something else at play?
More importantly, is there something we can do to keep sharp?
Dr Sanjay Gupta follows up the success of his New York Times best-seller Keep Sharp with 12 Weeks to a Sharper You – an expansion of the Keep Sharp program featured in the first book.
Dr Gupta is well-known as CNN’s chief medical correspondent and someone who Dean Ornish describes as “brilliant at bursting myths, allaying fears, and giving us the solutions we need to keep sharp throughout our lives”.
Allaying fears is a good place to start, I think, recalling a recent conversation with an old school friend. She’s in India, and had written to me about a get-together with a bunch of our classmates. She described the lunch in great detail, but when I requested photographs, she said she doesn’t take that many any more.
“I’m practising being in the moment, instead of behind a lens,” she wrote. Which is a great idea, I tell her, and I would follow suit, except that I fear forgetting not only where and when we met, but who.
Old photographs from our school days being a case in point. I’d have laughed if someone had said one day I would struggle to remember the names of girls I had spent years at school with. But now I do. I identify three, draw a blank, know the names of a few others and then another blank. And so it goes, the dot-dash morse code of memory.
I used to get photographs developed once a year, every year, carting home a couple of shoe box-sized cartons of prints which I then arranged in albums. With date, place, names, annotated on the reverse.
That lapsed during COVID, but I still have folders of photographs with identifying details.
But is there another way of holding on to dear memories?
Dr Gupta gives me hope with his guided program to help “build a better brain at any age”.
He would also make my friend happy with the dedication to his daughters: “Always take the time to be completely present, because it is perhaps the best and most joyous way to keep your mind sharp and your life bright”.
Takeaways from his insights:
• The brain has a rinse cycle and can even predict when it’s most likely to occur – sleep!
• A healthy brain is one that remembers the important things, while at the same time forgets the trivial. And yes, forgetting is just as important as remembering and can even help us sharpen our brains and make room for new – and more valuable – information.
• Cognitive decline is not necessarily inevitable.
He lists the six pillars of “brain trust” that will help keep us sharp. A refresher course on how to maintain brain health through nutrition (slash salt and sugar intake), movement (not just “exercise”), downtime (in waking hours), restorative sleep, discovery and connection.
Stressing the importance of social connections, Dr Gupta quotes Marcel Proust: Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
The Commitment Questionnaire details just what we hope to get out of the program.
Among them, more energy, less weight, deeper relationships, relief from and prevention of chronic conditions, less anxiety, worry, and feelings of depression.
12 Weeks To A Sharper You by Sanjay Gupta is published by Simon and Schuster, $27.
And saying he hopes one marked just about all of the boxes, Dr Gupta sets out show just how to achieve our goal.
I like that the 12-week program focuses one or two aspects of each of the above per week – bite-sized pieces are the best! And speaking of bites, there are great ideas for healthy snacks and meals, too.
Dr Gupta quotes an adage he heard in Okinawa. “I want to live my life like an incandescent light bulb. Burn brightly my entire life, and then one day suddenly go out.”
There should be no flickering in the end. We want the same for our brains.