Honey, have you seen my keys?

Researchers have now found a way to increase the flow of oxygenated blood to the frontal lobes, enabling you to build new neuron connections.

by Dr. Martha Grout — 

Do you often forget where you put your car keys? How about the names of people you’ve met, or the next point in that presentation you’re making? Welcome to classic symptoms of short-term memory loss, one of the first brain functions to go as we age.

Just as muscles need a lot of oxygen, brain cells need it too. The frontal lobes, the so-called “executive brain,” particularly need it.

Researchers have now found a way to increase the flow of oxygenated blood to the frontal lobes, enabling you to build new neuron connections. And when you exercise those new connections, they stick around, rather than being pruned out as dead wood by your nervous system.

More oxygen means more neurons, so exercise can help achieve better brain power and memory function.

Hemoencephalography (HEG) is a clean and easy way to measure the oxygen in the blood circulating to the frontal lobes, and it gives direct feedback to the patient. In sessions of less than 10 minutes, using a simple headband, you can quickly learn to increase the oxygenated blood in the critical executive brain.

Through the use of sounds, numbers and games, you can improve executive brain functions within six to eight weeks’ time. This improvement takes about half the number of sessions typically used in the older style of EEG-feedback training. Plus, with HEG, a person achieves permanent gains in brain function.

HEG is used in tandem with special music and sounds for biofeedback. The sounds and music are used to retrain the way you process sound and the way you listen. This can restore the ability to process sounds that have become diminished from ear infections or exposure to loud noise.

Research also shows us that HEG can be combined with special music and sounds to gently bring the mind into a relaxed, calm state. Since so many illnesses are aggravated by stress, this is an extremely beneficial aspect.

Remember when you could just rattle off a list of things from memory? The good news is that this need not be a lost skill.

Martha Grout, M.D., M.D.(H), has two decades in emergency medicine and a decade in homeopathic medicine. Her environmentally friendly Scottsdale, Ariz., office, The Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine, is the exclusive provider of BrainAdvantage, a breakthrough in simplicity and effectiveness for helping with memory loss and brain training. 480-240-2600, www.ArizonaAdvancedMedicine.com.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 27, Number 3, June/July 2008.