Brain training. That’s what. All three have leant their names to brain-boosting software.
Baroness Greenfield, the prominent neuroscientist and Director of the Royal Institution, is endorsing MindFit for the PC, a scientifically tested bit of software that limbers up the mind with interactive puzzles. Greenfield told the Times how looking after your body as you age is not the only requirement for good health.
“What concerns me is preserving the brain too,” she said. “There is now good scientific evidence to show that exercising the brain can slow, delay and protect against age-related decline.”
Should come in handy amongst her peers in the House of Lords, where the average age is 68 years.
This is quite a week for science-Hollywood links, isn’t it?
I was wonderfully impressed with Ms. Greenfield’s book on the brain and the secret sense of self, whose title escapes me at present. She has a gift for expressing a recondite subject in an easy and engaging fashion. Emotions are the building blocks of consciousness, is her thesis. She has an engaging writing style and develops her thesis in an understandable way. Although my proclivities are literary, I do like to read psychology once in a while. I did disagree with some points; for example, I do not think that depression and pain are as interconnected as she maintains in her chapter on “depression.” We come away from the book learning a lot about the brain and the sense of consciousness she argues for. Is it that hum underpinning everything? I was particularly fascinated to learn that dopamine causes schizophrenia.