The founder and chief director of UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth has published a new book that condenses 30 years of her research into a brain health fitness guide designed to maximize brain potential.
In Make Your Brain Smarter – Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus, Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman provides techniques to improve creative and critical thinking, strengthen healthy brain development and incite innovation throughout the lifespan.
The book, written by Chapman and the Center’s public relations director, Shelly Kirkland, takes readers on a quick tour of the brain’s frontal lobe and introduces readers to their cognitive CEO, the prefrontal cortex.
From there, Make Your Brain Smarter discredits some common myths, including:
- Aging does not equal brain slippage; cognitive health declines because we let it.
- Near-perfect memory is not the definition of a robust brain.
- IQ is an outdated and misleading index of brain potential.
- Every individual can rewire their brains by how they use them every day.
The book includes nine strategies for keeping your brain fit at any age, tests and exercises to boost problem solving and higher-reasoning capacity, and secrets to becoming a higher brain performer.
“These strategies revolutionized my life and could change the lives of millions. In the knowledge era, cognitive performance has never been more needed, but the distractions are great and growing. This book comes at the perfect time,” said Donovan Campbell, New York Times best-selling author of Joker One and the upcoming book The Leader’s Code.
Each chapter ends with “Know Brainer” expressions, or tips for brain health.
Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth.
Chapman’s research at UT Dallas melds interdisciplinary expertise to better understand how to evaluate and achieve optimal brain performance through preserving function of the frontal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for reasoning, planning and decision-making.
“After partnering with Dr. Chapman, it was an eye-opener to see how easily brain health can be measured, and how important it is to maintain it at every age. Maximizing our cognitive functioning is attainable and an important step in making good decisions over the entire lifespan,” said John Migliaccio, assistant vice president and director of Research and Gerontology at MetLife Mature Market Institute.
Chapman, the Dee Wyly Distinguished University Chair, coined the term “brainomics” to define the high economic cost of poor brain performance, and she sees the brain as the most significant path to raising the standard of living globally.
Dr. Chapman is studying the informative pathways to brain change in health, injury and disease. She is working to identify non-pharmacological and pharmacological treatment approaches and testing the effect of brain training to expand brain potential. With federal, state and private philanthropic support, she strives to push the limits of cognitive capacity in healthy adults of all ages – young adults, Boomers, Traditionalists and teens, business executives, educators, veterans, athletes who have experienced concussions, those with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and many others. Dr. Chapman was also instrumental in writing the Texas State Plan for brain health fitness.
Make Your Brain Smarter serves as a window into the growing brain health movement.
“Thanks to the pioneering brain research being done by Dr. Sandi Chapman, we can have healthy and productive minds for far longer than we might have imagined,” said T. Boone Pickens, entrepreneur, innovator, author and energy executive.