Having been an exercise enthusiast most of my life,  I find it difficult to skip my daily exercise routine. I just don’t feel right if I do. Now, as I enter the “sunset of my life”, as Ronald Reagan so eloquently put it, I find that cycling classes, hot yoga and descending steep, rocky hills don’t get along with my knees!  Consequently, I’ve had to improvise with daily walks and water jogging in the local YMCA pool.  Normally, I don’t socialize while exercising, but day after day I was greeted by a smiling, friendly fellow swimmer.  We began conversing, exercising my brain, and Marlene quickly became my confidant and my inspiration.  Let me introduce you to Marlene Caroselli!

Dr. Marlene Caroselli is an author, keynoter, and corporate trainer.

She has published over 60 books, including Jesus, Jonas, and Janus: The Leadership Triumvirate, and Principled Persuasion, named a Director’s Choice by Doubleday Book Club.

If you would like to read about Marlene in depth, please click here.

As our friendship grew, I learned that Marlene’s new book about brain fitness would be published in late 2017 or early 2018.  This was a vivid reminder to me that we don’t just lose muscle over time — our brains can atrophy, too.  Just as weight workouts add  muscle to your body and help you retain more muscle in your later years, brain exercises can also increase your brain’s cognitive reserve.

Brain Boost

Here’s a brain boost:  Intelligence is often the ability to discover a pattern among seemingly unrelated bits of information. There’s a community among the three words in the five riddles below. But first, directions and an example.

Directions: What word can be placed before or after the other words to show a connection with each of them?

Example: What word fits in front of or behind each of these words?  star, quiz and soda

The answer is “pop.” (pop star, pop quiz, soda pop)

See how quickly you can figure out the connection for the following combinations.

1.   shoulder     knife                 runner                     ____________
2.   baby            rain                 April                             ____________
3.   bleeding      broken             beat                             ____________
4.   movie          light                 lucky                           ___________
5. admirer       broken             garden                         ____________

Answers: blade, shower, heart, star, secret

Memory Tip

Directions: Once a day, have a family member or friend practice with you. (Work on these exercises with children and grandchildren, too.) Your “coach” will give you a one-digit number, which you are not to write down until he or she says “Record.” Then, you’ll receive a two-digit number. When the coach says, “Record,” write the number down from memory. Each time, your coach will give you a number one-digit-longer than the preceding number. Keep a log of your progress, specifying how many digits you were able to commit to short-term memory.

Here are a few to get you started. You can make up many more, very easily. Exchange your list of numbers with someone else bent on memory-improvement.

3

87

901

5201

84215

075328

4015285

10486762

690345718

For more of these Brain Exercises, click here.