Media are helping our brain stay young

Doing crosswords and wordsearch or sodokus help our brain stay young and reduce the risks of getting Alzheimer's disease.

The first crosswords appeared in England during the 19th century. The first known published crossword puzzle was created by a journalist named Arthur Wynne from Liverpool. It appeared in a Sunday newspaper, the New York World. 

During the early 1920's other newspapers picked up the newly discovered pastime and within a decade crossword puzzles were featured in almost all American newspapers.

According to Dr. Gary Small, the director of the UCLA Center on Aging, "Our brains age just the way our bodies age, but there's a lot that we can do to fight against it and keep ourselves mentally fit."

Berlin Aging Study (BASE)

Sudoku puzzles have recently become an extremely popular hobby, and great method of working out your brain, but thanks to new technologies there are a huge variety of interactive sodokus and crosswords online.

http://metronews.ca/games/crossword

Internet is making us stupid but there are new tools to train ourselves

When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be when looking at the screens of our computers and mobile phones, we are loosing memory and concentration capabilities.

While computers are making our brain lazy, people are developing new tools to train our brain.

In this frame, we can find a german  project which has used tech to improved the negative effects that  new technologies coud had in our brains. This project its called  NeuroNation.

NeuroNation is an interactive platform and community for cognitive training in the fields of arithmetic, logic, memory, sensory and language, and the two intensive courses lasting improve brain power.

Media and Brain training

In other countries, there are many kinds of media platforms that offer brain training apps and games.
For exemple, there is the UK's example and the  BBC's Brain training games

This games are part of the BBC's Brain Test Britain experiment, that tries to answer the question: does brain training actually work? Thanks to this experiment, they can say that this games don't make us smarter, but this doesn't mean that some brain capabilities can be improved. You can find the results here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/results/braintestbritain/1_results_summary.html

In France, in partnership with HAPPYneuron, TV5monde offer 15 brain training online exercises designed to stimulate memory, concentration, language, logic or visual-spatial perception.

In Spain, there is the Madrid's example. As brain training is a public service, some interactive games are provided by the City's web page: http://www.madridsalud.es/interactivos/memoria/memoria.php

While technology continues improving, traditional Media and New media have a lot of opportunities and possibilities to play a role in brain's training and evolution.