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?

Think about what you do at work currently, and then consider what you feel called to do. Do these two correspond? One feature, Taking the Money, from October 24th New York Times, showcased people in midlife who took buyouts, with their best in mind. For some boomers, careers come alive in mid-life, through aspirations they’d always dreamed of.

“Phil Bonfanti, a regional sales manager for Ford, took a buyout for his family’s sake.

Bobbie Battista, a CNN anchor, did not like the direction the company was going in.

For Doug Vance, a Delta pilot, it was the least damaging choice in a situation he could not control.

Enrique Rosselli, who took three buyouts in four years, saw the third as a sign to find a new line of business.

And for Betsy Werley, it was an early push into a career move that she wanted to make later if not sooner.“

For people who want more from mid-life, it’s simply a matter that an end of one career - looks more like an opportunity for a new start. Whatever the reason, one leg in their lives ended. In each case, the human brain kicked into high gear to create changes later in life. Shifts that bring new beginnings, unavailable to them in their youth. How so?

Folks who believe the best is still out there, tend to launch new foundations with tips and support from lifelong friends in a field they admire. These friends tell other friends. Ideas from new places prime their career-minded pumps. Encouragement from people they know goes a long way toward successful career moves yet to come.

If you’ve seen yourself locked into a mold lately, that’s merely collecting mold … why not plan to start again. Los, a character in William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, said it best … “I must create a system, Or be enslaved by another Man’s (human’s). I will not reason or compare, My business is to create.”

Los likely speaks to every mid-lifer who senses the best is yet to come. Downsizing or retirement can kick start your brain for the career you’re really called and gifted to launch. Is the best visible in your future?

Yikes! The younger generation says that my generation is stuck in its ways … and it seems they might be right. In response, I can buy new knitting needles, gum raisin bagels, rock back my yesteryears, or I can change. I say let’s leap for the latter and look again how the 50’s-something generation either gains or loses brain cells daily.

Focus on brain facts, and you’ll likely spot five realities to support those young generation rants about our ruts. Why? We fail to change, and our minds stall in deadly pit stops, whenever we …

1. View IQ as a fixed number that represents limitations – and miss more intellectual opportunities to think and act like Aristotle or Einstein than most people realize.

2. Insist we can teach through lectures and talking as if trumping the verbal approach, when multiple intelligence facts show a speech’s inability to pass on much of anything but boredom.

3. Think that hard knocks make us wiser and abandon our roles as lifelong learners - alongside experts of any age. It’s no longer true, about the hard knock thing, according to new research at the University of Leicester. Conversely, they found that adversity makes its victims more vulnerable to suggestions and lies. Oops –another rock in the bag?

4. Fail to reverse, “I can’t” expressions into, “I can” opportunities through increased serotonin and decreased cortisol for new adventures.

5. See ourselves as having arrived rather than still en route. From the brain’s perspective, that false vision, leads you to fall back on comfortable storage places in basal ganglia regions with promote, old shoe tactics. Your foot ware may have been fashionable in another era, but has long since ceased to move much of anything forward. When we operate more from the brain’s basal ganglia, than from its working memory – we fail to mix in newer ideas or to wear new shoes that fit the current generation’s facts and discoveries at their fingertips.

More importantly? How can we jumpstart our brains – so that they perform better than a bag of rocks? How can we reboot pulsating mental engines for change and adventure to replace one rut today, and avoid living the dreaded words, “too old to change.”

Now there’s another brain boomer blog that will be fun to write soon! Any ideas that could kick off that topic?