Strengthen Initials with airSlate SignNow

Strengthen initials

[Music] hello Matthew Bell with Alzheimer's fruit calm and today I wanted to talk about and expand upon a subject that I've touched on in a couple of other places both in written articles as well as in a couple of previous videos and that is exercises that you can do not for the body we'll get into those in subsequent series but for the mind so starting in an article that I posted on Alzheimer's proof calm and then subsequently in a video covering over some of the same territory I went over twelve different exercises that you can do twelve different things that you can do to keep your mind active I'll list them presently those included board and card games brain teasers and then I mentioned specifically checkers and chess crossword puzzles of course is the one that people think of when they think of this kind of thing language was number six learning a language trying to develop some element of familiarity with another language either in written or in spoken words music picking up and learning a musical instrument maybe music appreciation could also fit into that but mostly it was about learning a new instrument puzzles was number eight but actually fitting together jigsaw puzzles reading nine social interaction was ten that's a big one kind of surprised me that it was on there but that is one of the major ones Sudoku was number eleven and finally working is number twelve and that's just working at your regular job for more information I'll put the put links in the description to my article to the other video and I recommend those to you if you're not incorporating one or multiple ones of your life then you could be missing out on an opportunity to exercise your brain but I've also talked in other places both again in a written article and in a video about ways that you can enhance the effectiveness of your memory this might not be applicable to people who actually are currently having symptoms of Alzheimer's disease or some other form of dementia but they can certainly be used by people who are trying to avoid that end and I named four things in that particular discussion number one was don't over rely on memory aids so we're so used to writing things down or using our smartphones or whatever using Google to to act as a surrogate for actually remembering things that we used to just remember ourselves I mean that could be a simple thing that's often brought up for the phone numbers but it's just general fact in type information that we no longer have at our disposal mentally and we rely on these mechanical devices and it's arguable that they might be reducing our ability to memorize anything or reducing our memory capacity so a couple of specific tips on how to improve the memory were use the major system number three create mnemonics for yourself and number four create a mine palace or a mental palace and again I get into the specifics in those other places but for the present time I wanted to expand on that because in some cases some of these things like the major system they require doing groundwork to actually learn the system and implement it same thing with the mine palace I mean it takes some work to get that palace erected so to speak to get that palace in place or again with the 12 tips for previous exercises you know you actually have to have a board game you actually have to get the Sudoku puzzles or the crossword puzzles I mean there's some physical things that go along with that and so in this video I wanted to concentrate on those mental exercises that you can actually do with no other generally speaking nothing else is required just whatever is in your mind and so there are certain things that you can do certain exercises you can put your mind through memorization techniques alphabetization techniques and those are interesting to me because again they can be done anywhere and by anybody in terms of having setup there's no need for a space or an opponent or a board game in most cases there's a couple of things that are kind of a fun little game that I include that also that you know you'd want to play with somebody else but apart from that a number of these things are things that people can just kind of inculcate into their life incorporate into their life and use them to exercise their brain so let's get into it just a word on the difference between a manipulation and a memorization so manipulation the word manipulation actually comes from the Latin word money which is has to do with the hand so a manipulation and the strictest sense is going to be something you do manually which is another word in English that derives from the same Latin from the same Latin root and so when you think about the manipulation part of it it's essentially going to be things like actually writing the alphabet backwards or forward or actually spelling out the words by hand on paper but a memorization is going to be one that you do without the aid of any kind of writing implements no paper no pens or pencils just your brain once again you can combine some of these so alphabet alphabetization and memorization can be combined you can make it harder by running things forward or backward backward usually being harder or run it in Reverse spelling in Reverse alphabet and reverse counting in Reverse all of these things taks the brain in a way that it isn't usually taxed once again just as a reminder as a as a final summary statement you know as we go through these exercises and as you implement them once again you have to be aware of the stage of the person whether they have Alzheimer's or cognitive impairment or not so for example for me doing these exercises is going to have the purpose of trying hopefully to avoid any kind of manifestation of these impairments down the road but if a person already has mild cognitive impairment then obviously the point would be to try to avoid a more serious dementia developing and if a person in dementia or has Alzheimer's a specific diagnosis than that person's ambition presumably is going to be to try to preserve the memory function that's still there for as long as possible in terms of kinesthetics I'm gonna get into in another series there is a colleague of mine who is an expert on the physical aspect exercising and she is going to provide different tips in terms of exercises that can be done so I won't get into that here but suffice it to say that there is a kinesthetic element that can be brought in as well it can be very simple I mean it could be trying to balance on one leg as you're memorizing or reciting the alphabet we could be jogging in place or marching to be doing jumping jacks it could be a number of different simple kinesthetic movements that can be used and there's a number of reasons for this one reason you might think is that physical exercise sometimes helps the brain in terms of retention and in terms of repetition and repeating things back recall but it also can simply be a matter of using the brain for multiple different functions at one time I hesitate to call it multitasking is not really that and it's arguable according some articles that multitasking doesn't even exist it's just your brain you know shuffling between tasks very quickly and not actually both things at once but nevertheless it is possible to say balance on one leg and recite the alphabet backward and so this kinesthetic element can also add a little bit can add some variation and it might also add a little bit of a boost cognitively speaking some of these actually I'm gonna break these exercises into two different categories the first is cognitive only and then we're gonna include those exercises that have a combination of cognitive and kinesthetic aspects to them if that makes sense so hopefully it will as we go along so the first thing in cognitive only that's going to be subdivided into two different categories and that's going to be the alphabetical exercises and the numerical so just start with the alphabet now bear in mind here as we go along that these exercises are going to depend on the stage the stage the person's in an Alzheimer's disease they're also gonna depend on the application I mean are is this a an application to try to prevent Alzheimer's in the sense of and please understand again prevent here I don't mean magically prevent or guaranteed to prevent or any of that just mean are we doing the exercises like me if I'm doing the exercises I don't you know knock on wood I don't have mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's or anything so when I do these exercises I'm trying to bolster my brain strength so to speak to try to prevent it in the future on the other hand if somebody has mild cognitive impairment maybe they're trying to prevent it from going into Alzheimer's somebody has early state Alzheimer's they're trying to preserve their memories function for as long as possible so there are different applications they're different people they're gonna be different also baselines so for instance you know if somebody is coming from a particular skill level or understanding or whatever you have to take their base level into account as well so just starting with the alphabet here for the first set obviously the first exercise is just doing the alphabet regularly in terms of your ABCs just like a school child might starting with a moving forward and stopping at Z so green light is go red light is stop so start at a and at Z just like again a kindergartner would do and for some people this is gonna be a challenge at least for people this is gonna be a kind of a one of the questions that you would expect on a kind of a mini Mental Status examination just to kind of gauge where the person's cognitive abilities are and so if a person is far enough advanced in Alzheimer's this might be a challenge a little bit harder obviously to do the alphabet in Reverse now let me point out another thing here that's gonna be that there's a difference between manipulations and memorization in my lingo the manipulations are going to be those things that you handwrite and the memorization ZAR going to be those things that you just think through or speak out loud so you know ZYX WVU TS r QP o & m lk j IH g f e d c ba alphabet backward you can write it but it's going to be harder to just memorize it and say it backwards now the next category is going to be list memorization and here this could be anything this could be your grocery items this could be you know a list of your favorite movies a list of the winners of you know the last few Stanley Cup Finals I mean this could be anything easy list memorization is going to be those things that are related in terms of there are themes surrounding the words for example bacon coffee eggs muffins pancakes so if you're gonna memorize that list obviously those words revolve around the theme of breakfast items obviously you can have other themes so think about a theme like construction brick contractor improvement nail roof I'm just coming up with arbitrary words as an exercise they could be meaningful in the sense that let's say let's say a person had their mom dad grandpa grandma who was in the business of construction so these words might be meaningful they might be at least thumb at ik so that they're easier to get a handle on they might have they might be a challenge they might be something that's of interest so I'm just coming up with word lists there may be no practical purpose in memorizing these words it's just an exercise or just like a shopping item list it might have a practical goal namely to successfully retrieve those items from the grocery store and and again these things have no you don't need extra equipment for this you could do this just in your own life and obviously I mean here by construction I mean home construction now a medium difficulty list is going to be unrelated words and you can kind of see here I'm starting with easy medium hard you know I'm not an education expert either on top of the other things that I'm not an expert in I'm not an expert on education or on anything that would give me these are you know any kind of expertise in making the judgment as to whether or not these are easy medium hard but intuitively it makes sense that unrelated words are gonna be harder to memorize then once that revolve around a theme because the theme is gonna help you to get a handle on the words and help you to memorize them so for example unrelated words I just come up with an example here baron duck mattress parachute violent as far as I can tell these words have no real connections at the same time they are all concrete common nouns so you can think of them that way there is a connection there a very kind of high level of generalization but apart from that there's really no other connection and so these words are just arbitrarily strung together gonna be a little bit harder to memorize even harder than that are gonna be words that are abstract these could be words like anger courage love villainy here these could be words like that adjectives all kinds of words that pick out concepts or abstract ideas but extra hard you might consider those words that are just particles in the English language or articles or prepositions things that have really no there's nothing mental there's no image there's no nothing for you to to really hang your hat on in terms of trying to get a fix on what the words are so this kind of a list of words might be even harder to memorize now the next category of either manipulations or memorization and once again if you write these then they would be manipulations if you memorize them only they would be memorization zin my lingo and I'm thinking of that as the memorization part would be harder than the manipulations so in terms of alphabetization easy would be to memorize names that are distant from one another and I mean distant in terms of the letter combination so for example Anita George Nicole Simon Zachary you know we have a letter from the a then we have G moving forward and is somewhere in the middle alphabet s a little bit further along and then Zachary obviously the last letter of the alphabet so these are going to be easier to memorize then for example a medium difficulty list where they have adjacent initial letters like Luke Mary Nicholas Owen Peter so LM n o P are adjacent letters at least in my again I'm not a linguist here but if they are adjacent letters and so this kind of a list is gonna be a little bit harder to alphabetize here what and then here's a here's the thing you could just give to somebody than the names orally in other words you don't write them down you just say let's say Owen Mary Luke Nicholas Peter and then the person has to both memorize the list and alphabetize it that would be one you could just give them the names and they could manipulate the list write it in alphabetical order memorization adding memorization to it would make it all the more difficult another thing would be some of these lists are going to be you're going to be able to have a kind of an easier and harder permutation depending on whether you run the alphabetization forward or backwards so for example Luke Mary Nicholas Owen Peter in alphabetical order Peter Owen nicholas mary luke obviously in reverse alphabetical order and if you are doing all that mentally it makes it a little bit more challenging a hard alphabetization would be where the names are proximate in the sense that the letter combinations are very close to one another so for instance look at these names here Abigail Addison Agatha Amanda Andrea these names are all in letter combinations that are very close to one another and so they become more challenging because you're not dealing with alphabetizing the first letter but you're dealing with alphabetizing the second letter and obviously it would get even harder if you make it the third letter if you make it the case that you are starting to alphabetize not just the first letter or the second letter but if you start making word combinations where you would have to memorize and alphabetize up to three letters four letters it's going to be even more challenging extra hard abstract again instead of concrete instead of proper names maybe do common names maybe you do abstract nouns next manipulation word length arrangement so here easy what easy one would be short words that increase in length so obviously increasing in length is going to add difficulty but it's going to be easy if each of the words has an obviously different length so for instance pot compared to Anatomy the word pot is three letters Anatomy is seven letters so obviously pot is shorter than Anatomy so we have here I just have a simple list pot fire ghost bucket Anatomy pot is three letters fires four ghosts is five buckets six Anatomy is seven so it become it's a little bit easier in terms of placing them in order when each of the words is obviously a different length and the others medium difficulty would be reversing that so obviously Anatomy bucket goes fire pot using the same words reversing the word order you could also add challenge by lengthening the words and you can also add challenge by making certain words the same length so that they're going to be they're going to have to be placed together in the list but here for instance puzzlement hijacking subjectivism psychoanalyze counterexample puzzlement is ten highjacking just as eleven twelve thirteen fourteen letters so from ten letters to fourteen letters these are going to be obviously more challenging doing it in Reverse would add another layer so this kind of word exercise it'd be something like that a person I'm not saying I'd be able to successfully do it and given my current ability to work through these but but this would be the kind of thing obviously you're not gonna give this to a person who's in late middle stage of Alzheimer's disease but you could potentially do it yourself if you're a caretaker work through these exercises yourself with the idea that it's going to help you to build up your cognitive reserve we talked about cognitive reserve and other places I'll just kind of bring it in now cognitive reserve is kind of the idea that you know you can lift a little bit heavier than you need to like I used the example of a baseball player swinging two bats before he gets into the batter's box he swings two bats on the idea that swinging two bats is gonna prepare him for swinging one bat he if you can swing two bats he can swing one so if you can do these exercises the idea is you're gonna have farther to decline it's just a theory just a hypothesis but that's the idea of cognitive reserve now extra-hard word length again would be with the in Reverse the next set of manipulations is going to have to do with spell it so easy ones obviously short words so cat CA T dog do G frog pineapple house you get the picture just like again a school child and a lot of these exercises are going to be similar to what children would do in terms of language acquisition it's somewhat reversed however obviously if somebody has dementia they are losing language ability and so instead of children working from easy to hard you might think of it as you're really in terms of the stage of Alzheimer's they're going to be going from harder to easy because as they advanced as the disease progresses they're going to be able to complete fewer and fewer these but again the hope is with these particular exercises is that you might build cognitive reserve you might help to preserve mental function for longer than it would have lasted without doing these exercises medium difficulty obviously longer words helmet grocery poultry mountain scissors just random assortments here if you add memorization once again on top of that and once again you can spell them forward you can spell them in Reverse that would even layer a challenge on top so we can spell home at heo mu T you can say okay how do you spell helmet reversed well T um le H right but once again it's gonna be harder to do that memorizing it that would be manipulating it so if you see it written it's gonna be easy to just read it backwards or at least easier than memorizing hard words would be words that are just more challenging to spell so presumably that's going to be ones that have odd letter combinations maybe that create sounds that are more difficult to guess or they're gonna be just simply longer words so establishment mathematics poltergeist seismograph topological there's one I thought I would throw in for fun and part of it is it's a tribute to my dad my dad used to play this game with my sister and with me when we were all usually it was in the swimming pool when I was a little kid but the initial game is what my dad called it and it basically involves several different steps as simple game first is you select a category so for instance maybe we say the categories movie stars and then you specify initials of somebody who is a movie star you could do movie titles you could do anything but specify the initials so let's say CB then the question is clues or questions namely does the person who's providing the initial so I am giving the initial CB then I know who that initial refers to I know whose initials those are so the person guessing then would either get clues from me that I would volunteer or they would be permitted to question me so let's say we chose to do Clues well if we chose to do clues than I might say okay CB was female and then she was called the it girl and then that might trigger in somebody's mind oh that's Clara boat on the other hand they might be permitted asked question it's gonna be very similar they might ask well she's female or male what movie did she star in what genre was she known for and so on and then you'd ultimately arrive at whoever the initials are in this case of course I had in mind Clara Bow now the second set of manipulations is numerical and so here we're just gonna start I'm going to start with just a block in numbers we started before the basic building block was obviously the alphabet for the alphabetical manipulations and this one is gonna be the numbers you could do one to ten one to 100 one to a thousand presumably this is also going to be a function of the stage and the purpose as we previously discussed and you can start obviously one way of counting the numbers would simply be to move forward from one to a hundred just like a school child would do to learn his or her numbers but another way that would make it more challenging would simply be to count backward so counting backward from 100 literally by once 100 99 98 97 96 95 and so on you could also count backward by intervals so for instance let's say we counted backward by 10 so starting at 100 we would count backward by 10 so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 if you want count it on the on the blocks or just no obviously 100 minus 10 is 90 so 100 90 80 the 60 50 40 30 20 10 and finally ending at zero so once again starting with just our number grid you can again start at 100 and you can make it even more challenging by varying the interval doing something that's a little bit less so obviously counting by ones is fairly intuitive counting by tens counting by 5's maybe might be a little easier but how about counting by sevens so 193 86 79 72 65-58 51 44 37 30 23 16 9 2 and so on now you can also do forward counting variations so making it harder than just counting normally by one would be to count by intervals of whatever so let's say we counted by 6 obviously starting at 1 from 6 we would get to 7 from 7 we'd go to 13 19:25 31:37 forty three forty nine fifty five sixty one sixty 77379 eighty-five ninety one ninety seven and then that would conclude that now that's similar to something that is referred to as skip counting so in skip counting you know we would generally you know you generally start with 0 or whatever essentially we're gonna start with 6 so if you skip count starting with 6 you know you just say 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72 78-84 1996 skip counting by sixes 2 4 6 8 10 12 and so on skip counting skip counting by fives 5 10 15 20 25 30 and so on and this is a challenge depending on once again stage intellectual ability cognitive function what your baseline was and what your goal is are you trying to avoid Alzheimer's and right now knock on wood you have no cognitive impairment at all are you trying to slow down the advance of Alzheimer's are you trying to what you know trying to stop progression from mile cognitive impairment into some worst form of dementia what's the goal if you found something of use in this video please like the video subscribe to the channel click the notification Bell to be alerted to new content as it becomes available I remind you that I am trying to get together content for the physical exercises and for some of the other to expand on some of the other topics maybe that we touched on in this video so you can look for that content if you're interested I thank you so much for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you again in another video thank [Music] you