clair073

In the United States, some 5-7% of the population is clinically depressed in any given year. Over a lifetime, there are high odds that each of us has been depressed at some point. Sadly for seniors, the likelihood can increase with age. A new treatment approach that combines mindfulness meditation and aerobic exercise seems promising. In a recent study, 22 clinically diagnosed patients with major depressive disorder were put on a treatment regimen that begins with 30 minutes of mindfulness meditation and is followed by 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. Thirty people without depression symptoms served as a comparison group. In the meditation session, patients were told to focus on the present moment and their slow, deep breathing and excluding all mind-wandering and intrusive thoughts. Exercise was on a treadmill or stationary bicycle. At the end of eight weeks, patients were assessed again for depression symptoms, and symptoms decreased on average by 40%. An electrically evoked brain-wav...

I first got interested in memory training at age 15 when my dad was a salesman for the Dale Carnegie leadership course, which included a section on memory training. My dad taught me some tricks that enabled me to memorize the gist of what was on every page of a magazine, by page number, in 30 minutes. I used to put on demonstrations for prospective enrollees. Before the recruitment meeting started, the leader would tell the audience, "Everybody see Billy here. Stand up Billy. I am going to give him this latest magazine issue, which he has never seen, and let him study it for 30 minutes. Then we will interrupt the meeting and you can ask him what is on any given page. Or you can tell him what is on a page, and he can tell you the page number." To my own astonishment, I could do it and it was not that hard. The basic gimmick was first to memorize a number code that converted page numbers into a visual image. For example, the code for 20 was "noose," as in a hangman...