“I just had them,” I said, fishing through the pockets of the jacket I had worn that morning. “Where did I put my keys?”

My husband glanced up from his book. “Did you look to see if you put them in the freezer?”

If you think this is a joke, you are probably too young to read on.

Aging is no joke:

Our skin wrinkles.

Our bones and muscles become weaker.

We do not hear so well anymore, either.

Our bladders lose control….

OK, I’ll stop.

But really, the scariest part is what begins to happen to our brains.

We start with around 100 billion brain neurons, but we begin to lose them as we age, negatively affecting brain function. Our neural deterioration is leading to a worldwide dementia epidemic.**

For centuries, the brain was thought to be a fairly fixed and unregenerative organ that, once in decline, was not likely to recover. World-renowned Norman Doidge, M.D., best-selling author of The Brain’s Way of Healing, teaches us that neurons and pathways in the brain are actually much more modifiable than we thought. Doidge argues that, by becoming mindfully aware of the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements, we can literally rebuild our brain maps.

This sounds familiar to me. My tai chi master, Dr. Paul Lam, has long taught that integrating body and mind through mindful awareness is one of the ultimate aims in tai chi:

  • Mindful awareness of weight transference, consciously shifting our weight onto one leg, placing the empty foot forward, backward or sideways, and then feeling the weight shift from the weighted foot to the empty foot.
  • Mindful awareness of where our feet are, feeling all nine points of the foot on the ground beneath us.

It turns out that mindfully practicing tai chi is a fantastic method for rewiring our aging brains. Dr. Doidge says he personally practices tai chi to get into the flow state that presumably opens his perception to such sensory differentiations.

What an exciting opportunity to reverse the mental deterioration that would have us forget that we left our keys in the freezer!

Are you or someone you know experiencing a sense of memory deterioration? If so, what actions, if any, are you or they taking to deal with this issue? What recommendations do you have based on your experience?


*This first appeared in Dr. Paul Lam’s Tai Chi for Health Newsletter, Issue Number 189, May 2017

**I’m not a medical expert, but the information I present here is recognized by scientists and available in the popular press.

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