Life is becoming easier and easier thanks to technology. Big businesses are selling more and more gadgets to make life of an average person incredibly simple. Talk to Siri in the iPhone and she dials the phone number. No one remembers phone numbers anymore. Everyone depends on the contact information stored in the phones. Everyday number of people who will not be able to read a map and find directions are increasing because GPS is making maps obsolete. So is technology making us dumb? Sandeep Grewal, MD the author of book, ‘Dementia Express: Lose Your Memory in 100 Ways’, thinks so. “Technology is acting as our extended brain. It is taking the job of our brain away. So we are not using our brains as much as we did before.”, he says.
In his book ‘Dementia Express: Lose Your Memory in 100 Ways’ Dr. Grewal lists some of the easy ways to stave off Dementia by not outsourcing our daily activities to these gadgets we carry around. Five easy ways to continue exercising our brains are:
1. Don’t use GPS all the time: Use GPS only if your are running short of time or if you are lost. Otherwise let your brain exercise while you are driving. Let your brain try to locate the streets, decide when to turn instead blindly following that voice in your car.
2. Don’t forget handwriting: Handwriting is becoming a lost art. Technology is forcing us to type more than handwrite. Soon humans are about to lose the art of handwriting. Handwriting involves complex hand movements and exercises our brain in a unique way. Typing involves coarse hand movements and does not exercise the brain as much. How many of you have handwritten a page in the last one year?
3. Don’t use Calculators: We have outsourced simple task like adding numbers to calculators not only for better accuracy but also for the reason of pure laziness. No wonder the new generation has hard time calculating numbers in their minds. Calculators are the most common example of outsourced brain.
4. Don’t just watch television: Television is a machine which spits out audio and visual to your brain readymade. Whereas reading requires brain to process the read information and generate a visual in your mind. Now that is an exercise for your brain. So if you get your news only from television, try picking up a newspaper.
5. Use stairs not elevators: If you have been using elevators for a long time, climbing up and down will be uncomfortable at the least in the beginning. During the activity of using the stairs not only our muscles get exercise, our brain does too. It is a balancing act too.
There are lots of other daily activities which we can do in a way to exercise our brains. After all if you you don’t use your brain, you lose your brain. Don’t you?
Full Disclosure: Dementia Express, the book is written by the author of this article.