Valentin Bragin, M.D., Ph.D.
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Dear Reader,
You’ve always had a good memory and were proud of it. You remembered names, phone numbers and birthdays. You knew everything about your files at work and could answer questions immediately and from recall.
But slowly over time, it’s become much more difficult to recall the names of your high school friends, your neighbors and work related details. Phone numbers, addresses, items on your shopping list, and birthdays are beginning to escape you.
If that sounds familiar, this book is for you.
If you are over sixty-five years of age, this book is for you.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to recall things with ease, and not be embarrassed about forgetting facts and details?
If that sounds right, this book is for you.
If you are a healthcare professional working with geriatric patients and seeking an innovative treatment approach, then this book is for you.
Just a little stress can make us unable to recall the correct word, a recent event, or the title of a book or movie. This book provides a practical, easy, and well-researched solution to the problem of memory loss.
We present various exercises developed at the Center. These exercises are intended to activate your brain and improve your attention, concentration, memory, and coordination. Hundreds of elderly, medically ill patients have already successfully learned and responded to these exercises.
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Valentin Bragin, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and the founder and medical director of the Stress Relief and Memory Training Center (SRMTC) in Brooklyn, New York, where more than 2,000 patients have been treated within the first 12 years of its operation.
Dr. Bragin graduated and earned his Ph.D. from one of the oldest and most prestigious medical schools in the former Soviet Union, the Russian Medical Military Academy in Leningrad. Dr. Bragin also holds an engineering degree in computer science (medical informatics).
His areas of interest include stress and stress-related disorders, aging, and rehabilitation of brain functions in people with cognitive problems. He has dedicated many years of his medical career to researching the impact of stress on illness and overall health.
For the last seven years, Dr. Bragin has focused on the preservation of cognitive functions in the elderly who suffer from memory loss and depression. His strategy involves an integrative treatment approach utilizing the brain’s own reserves and resources, which can be activated at any age.
The foundation of his Brain Activation Program is a set of unique sensory-motor exercises that are presented in this book. Dr. Bragin enjoys using these exercises himself and strongly believes that they can slow down or at least postpone the process of memory decline. He continues to develop new and unique sensory-motor exercises.
The results of Dr. Bragin’s treatment program have been presented at national and international conferences and have been published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias in 2005.
Dr. Bragin is the author of numerous publications.
We all know the drill. If you’re sick, you need to take a rest and refrain from physical exercises. Stay in bed. Don’t walk. Over and over, we are told that decreased physical activity will help our bodies fight disease. But for people who suffer from decreased concentration and memory, anxiety and depression, my advice should be quite the opposite: spend less time in bed, do more walking, and be more physically active.
For the last twelve years, I have been working with severely ill geriatric patients at the Stress Relief and Memory Training Center, which I founded in 1994 and have headed ever since. During this work, I have developed the Brain Activation Program for elderly Russian-speaking patients suffering from a combination of serious medical and emotional problems, and decreased memory and concentration. The core of the program is a set of light physical exercises that are done mostly in a sitting position. During program development, my patients have been active collaborators, invaluable partners, and critics. They learned the program in the office and continued to use it at home.
In the process of program creation, we took into account our patients’ limited physical abilities. These light physical exercises are very simple, well-tolerated, and easy to learn and remember. For several years, we handed out pamphlets for different exercises.
In 2005, in response to my patients’ requests, I published How to Activate Your Brain in Russian.2 This book we have been utilizing in our center ever since. The present book in English has been updated and extended.
This book consists of four parts:
Part 1 is a description of some stress-relief techniques, well-tolerated by elderly patients.
Part 2 illustrates light physical exercises that help activate brain functions, especially coordination, attention, and concentration.
Part 3 consists of a set of exercises that help strengthen memory.
Part 4 has a brief description of how food, music, and light help to activate the brain.
