Simple 60-second brain trick could help sharpen memory and fight brain fog

Brain games, crosswords and math puzzles are often promoted as ways to sharpen memory, but neurologists warn that generic exercises may not address the specific cause of mental fog.Dr.Rhonda Voskuhl, a professor of neurology at UCLA and co-founder of Cleopatra RX in Los Angeles, says brain exercises only work if they target the specific mental function that is slowing down.“You can’t just do random cognitive exercises,” Voskuhl told Fox News Digital at the Livelong Women’s Health Summit in New York City in September.

“They’ve got to fit the problem.”The problem, she said, is verbal memory.“Doing math is not going to help … You need an exercise that will help you with words.”Mental fog — especially the kind triggered by midlife hormone changes during perimenopause and menopause — impacts very specific areas of the brain, according to Voskuhl.When estrogen levels drop, overall intelligence and basic logic remain completely normal.

Instead, the brain takes a hit in two main areas: verbal memory (recalling names and words) and processing speed (thinking quickly under pressure), experts say.Games like Sudoku and other number puzzles primarily exercise logic and math skills, so they may not improve word-recall difficulties.“It’s not a global problem with the brain,” Voskuhl said.“It’s not global brain atrophy, but there are some regions on MRIs and research studies that show that the hippocampus, the memory area, will have some atrophies, some functional connection issues.”To understand why word-based exercises may help, it is useful to distinguish between the following two stages of memory, experts say.Brain fog typically affects retrieval, not encoding.

The word or name is still stored safely in the memory, but the brain’s search engine is running slowly.To effectively target brain fog, Voskuhl says exercises need to focus on two things: finding words and working quickly.“It’s basically processing speed,” she said.“So yo...