Stories inspire us to write from meaningful experiences. What you may not know, though, is that to write stories, is to develop new dendrite brain cell connections in your linguistic intelligence. Not a bad takeaway when you consider that writing process can also ensure you a younger brain….

What fun or moving story projects itself on the back screen of your mind, that you could write as a way to exercise your brain? I’ll start.

Ten years ago, during a skidoo race to the Igloolik Airport , I almost missed a once-a-week flight to another remote community on the north tip of Baffin Island. It was Saturday, I was 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle and the mercury was about 70 degrees below zero. For all those reasons, I counted myself lucky to get Cecilia, head of the Government Social Work, to roar up to my home in a skidoo, in a last ditch effort to get me there. Yikes! Did I tell you yet about frigid conditions on Baffin Island – up beside Greenland?

Back to my story though… ten minutes before flight time, we hopped onto a small broken skidoo seat, piled my four bags anywhere they’d stick, and Cecilia promised to race back for one bag that refused to stay with us. What a ride! We zoomed through Igloolik’s snow-packed, uneven ditches, out of town to the airport, as if headed down Aspen mountain in a ski race.

Cecilia skidded into gullies over bumps and teetered on the edge of snow banks while I held onto blowing bags, and held my breath. Inuit seem undaunted by the tundra’s’ icy obstacles, and the weaving and tipping of her race machine seemed part of the whole arctic adventure.

Unprepared for a skidoo, or the sub zero temperatures, and even less prepared for the rugged terrain we encountered, I fought to hold bags flying in the wind. Although I could see little of anything that wasn’t white, from behind frozen eyelashes, I caught Cecilia’s smile – a symbol of sheer conquest.

Moments after I spilled into the tiny airport, and tried to thaw ice that seemed to form over my eyeballs, Cecilia burst through the airport door - red-faced and smiling. Hurling a large frozen bag in front of me, she pronounced. “Hope there’s no breakables in this thing… Yer bag flew off the skidoo three times… but I got ‘em here.”

“No problem.” I shot back, “It could have been me flying off that skidoo” And it nearly was.

To write this little skidoo story today, is to relive a keen lesson I learned up past the North Pole. It’s a tale about gratitude for people’s generosity, and about the Canadian Arctic’s hidden wonder. Looking back at this yarn, reminds me a bit of the wonder many brains hide – in uncharted landscapes, now that I think of it.

New dendrite connections keep your brain alive, and writing a story revitalizes these neuron networks. You don’t have to go to the High Arctic to find that story, either. Just jot a few details to share one of your fun or moving moments, and you’ve already started a writing journey that adds youth. So what’s your story?

Everybody loves a good joke, but when the chips are down humor can be hard to find. That’s why the book, LaughLab is such a hit. LaughLab started as an experiment to discover the world’s funniest joke, and the book is a summary of the findings.

Dr. Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire collaborated with the British Association for the Advancement of Science for the discovery. You can download a copy of it here, to hear humor that lifts your day.

Sometimes life where you stand can crack you up, when you least expect it. Because I’m a rather serious golfer I’m still laughing at the red fox who swipes every golf ball it spots from other serious golfers in Montana.

Humor comes faster to those who look around for the funnier side of a thing. Check out Christopher M. Knight’s Top 7 Tips to Laugh … where research shows the importance of laughter for a healthy mind. Did you know that a funny movie boosts a healthy flow of blood to your brain? Or that you learn more and remember more when you laugh?

Knight says you’ll find more humor if you…

1. Identify what makes you laugh and actively look for those situations. Your brain will actually help you find it when you decide to focus on more fun and games!
2. Watch at least one funny movie per week, and play funny cd’s or tapes in the car while driving to work (excellent way to get over morning moods!).
3. Make fun of what you actually fear. See the comic side in your fearful thoughts, exaggerate them and make them ridiculous.
4. Act silly and make other people laugh; that will get you sniggering too.
5. Have a roll on the floor with your kids or your dog. Try a pillow fight for a change.
6. Take some laughing yoga classes; they’ll get you cracking up.
7. Laugh at yourself each and every day. If you can make the problems you face funny, or at least see them in a different light, they will probably cease being a problem.

Take time to play, and humor will likely find you. Joel Goodman, director of the Humor project, showed in an interview how to mix laughter with play and he finds more to laugh at than most. How about you?

Bad news and cranky neighbors are here to stay — but what’s silly that could crack up your day anyway? Get others in on the laugh and it’s twice as funny. In fact laughter adds new friends and strengthen relationships you already have, according to laughter therapists.

Not all laughter benefits the brain equally though. Whenever we focus on … or laugh at most … determines how the brain rewires itself for more health benefits.

For example… over time… seniors who laugh at common stereotypes of aging … or people who laugh at gambling and wild living… are more apt to live those negative stereotypes. It’s because of the brain’s plasticity and that’s another post coming to the Brain Boomber site soon.

In the meantime, though, what makes you laugh anyway?

If you could do something to keep your brain healthy into your senior years- and ward off mental health problems - what would that be? Watch this amazing interactive display of a brain’s MRIs over time and see for yourself all the power in older brains – power that is activated by what you do.

Dementia’s on the rise in aging populations according to recent research in the Public Library of Science. With more people living well into their nineties, comes a sharp rise in mental incapacitation in later years. Sadly, that longer life expectancy means dementia will become much more common, as things stand now.

Not surprisingly, this 10 year UK study found that an 80 year old person who is mentally healthy, holds no guarantee to die without mental limitations. In fact the 12,000 participants, all over 65 … showed a 58% chance of developing cognitive impairment or dementia at ages above 95. Compare that with people who passed on between the ages of 65 and 69 and who had a 6% chance of dying with dementia.

Gender and education alter the odds too, but not as you may think. This UK study showed women as more likely than men, to develop dementia. Interestingly, a higher level of education was associated with only a slightly lower risk of dementia in much older adults.

Two findings interested me especially because of the hope in this study tucked into doable suggestions that could help prevent dementia at every age….

Firstly, researchers recommended that people use more preventative measures to delay the onset of dementia, since these will “yield enormous benefits.”

While they admitted that it’s difficult to prove that all preventative measures will work, and they even warn us that aging populations should be prepared for large numbers of elderly patients with dementia, they still saw benefits for those who use their minds far later in life.

Secondly, the study affirmed that education - or tactics people use daily to improve their lives – seem to prevent decline in mental functioning, later in life when dementia odds increase.

The takeaway for baby boomers, as I see it is simply…

Use your brain more….

Play with brain teasers such as Sudoku … or take up new interests like Brain Age… which uses different parts of the human brain to lower your DS brain age daily. There are endless options.

Garden, swim, or listen to a good orchestra to maintain a healthy brain through activity in your later years. It’s just that people rarely start new habits in their 90’s but those who start now will likely continue then. What’s your mind-bending plan?

Do you create like Einstein did daily, or criticize like his eighth grade teacher - who called him a bonehead? Or do you create blogs into network magazines, like John Evans’ Syntagma, which moves at the cusp, and not without criticism from a few?

The human brain, at peak performance is hardwired to handle risk and criticism with innovative responses that critics only envy, but rarely reach. According to Danah Zohar’s research, the brain wires for peak performance simply based on what we do with a day.

It starts with curiosity - where you look at a problem - with a possibility in mind, that could solve it. Then, innovators ask the mind-bending question, ‘What if…?”

Google looked at its innovative search technologies, which connect millions of people around the world with information every day, and spotted a problem. Competitors were catching up. Their question, ”What if …? led them to purchase YouTube.

Many said it couldn’t work and others said it shouldn’t. What was Google’s response? The eight year old company and its Stanford Ph.D. leaders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, took their top web property behind closed doors and created their solution. They included a band of people who were mentally wired for innovation, and excluded distractions from nay sayers. And when they stepped out again, Google announced its purchase of YouTube for 1.65 Billion in stock.

Know any boomers taking risks lately, for the purpose of creating something new or improved? How about you? When experiences fuel new choices the brain revs up to leapfrog with the next generation. It makes me sad to see so many intelligent mid-lifers lagging behind lately as critics.

In the meantime, and without many years of experience, Google leaders simply gathered brainpower for change, through a circle of intelligent thinkers. Only eight years old, Google’s targeted advertising program offers businesses of all types a way to measure results, while sustaining a wider web experience for all users. Some of the smartest people in the world work at their headquarters in Silicon Valley and in offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The risk involved adding another winning element before others bought it. Around only since February 2005, YouTube adds a cutting edge consumer media company to Google, where people can view and share original videos worldwide across the internet.

With YouTube’s reputation to easily upload and share video clips through websites, blogs, and e-mail, and Google’s gift for search technologies, they both increased their investment. YouTube currently sends out over 100 million video views daily with 65,000 new videos uploaded each day. Through its own innovation, it quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment.

Critics are now asking, … But can Google sustain this creative edge? What do you think? It will likely mean more innovation in how Google organizes its 9000 employees. Critics say they cannot continue to sustain their organized chaos approaches with this new addition. But then that’s a critic’s job – to complain. Google’s job seems more rewarding to me … they continue to expect their engineers to create daily, even while others are gunning for them.

Do you spend at least 20% of your day creating something new, as Google engineers are encouraged and expected to develop their own ideas? Start with the question… “What if… and your brain will do the rest. It’s already hardwired for peak performance - whenever you draw on its creative parts as Google just did when it bought YouTube.

No question - nay sayers will complain that they need more money to create like Google…. Using resources you already possess, do you see any possibilities for something new in your day?