What is cognitive fitness?

Are you as mentally sharp as you’d like to be? As you get older, keeping your brain in shape is just as important as attending to your physical health. Cognitive fitness is all about ensuring you have the brainpower to efficiently reason, remember, learn, plan, and adapt.

Obviously, memory is a key component, but cognitive fitness also encompasses a variety of brain-based skills, such as problem solving, perceiving the world around you, processing what you see and hear, communicating, and making sound decisions. It includes the ability to focus attention, comprehend new information, use language effectively, interact with others, control impulses, weigh options, and formulate and pursue plan

These brain-based skills, or cognitive abilities, help you carry out any task, from the simplest to the most complex. The skill set required is often much broader than you might imagine. For example, the simple act of answering the door involves much more than hearing the doorbell and opening the door. It involves a surprising number of cognitive skills, including these:

• perception (hearing the ring)

• memory (remembering that the sound is your doorbell)

• inference making (knowing that someone is at your door and wants to see you)

• decision making (deciding whether or not to open the door)

• visuospatial memory (remembering where the door is)

• orientation (navigating your house to get there)

• motor skills (getting up, walking to the door, and unlocking it) • facial memory (recognizing your neighbor)

• language skills (greeting, talking, and understanding language)

• social skills (interpreting tone of voice and interacting properly with another human being).

Specific parts of your brain, working together, support each one of these cognitive abilities. This means that optimizing cognitive function involves much more than simply working on memory formation and retrieval. For optimal cognitive fitness, all of your brain needs to be working at its peak.

In addition to cognitive tasks, your brain also performs many essential functions that do not fall under the category of conscious thought. It regulates your body temperature, heart and breathing rates, sleep and wake cycles, and even the moisture and color of your skin by influencing the function of sweat glands and the state of blood vessels. Though these functions are not considered part of cognitive (thinking) health, they are very much a part of brain health in general