The Menta handbook discusses both in theory and practice how you can develop your mental fitness.

The Chapter „Mental Fitness” moreover, provides more specific information and exercises on this topic highlighting the most important cognitive functions and their development.

Please see the handbook chapter 1 and its 8 exercises, listed here:

M1.1 | Learn to Learn  

M1.2 | Utmost Attention Challenge      

M1.3 | Leaders in the Dark        

M1.4 | Scent of a Melody          

M1.5 | Awesome Ads  

M1.6 | I Did It My Way 

M1.7 | Why Does It Happen?   

M1.8 | Creative Visualisation

The Mental Fitness module trains, improves and maintains your cognitive performance. During ageing the size of nerve cells diminishes, the number of dendrites and synapses decreases and the degeneration of the myelin sheath can also be observed, which negatively affects mental processing. The most affected cognitive functions are those related to frontal lobe functioning. Thus, compared to young age groups older people usually perform less well in tasks involving working with memory, attention, planning, cognitive control, fluid intelligence or inhibitory processes. Data also shows that after age 50 work performance decreases only in areas where rapid response to uncertain and varied stimuli is required, and in occupations involving high physical workloads. In other areas, knowledge and experience may offset cognitive impairment.

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LIBRARY

BABEL: 

• Facilitators can ask participants to surf the internet to find the translations in many other languages.
• Facilitators can invite learners to offer their thoughts creatively to find the room names in languages (e.g. Slovenian) or national dialects or old style words with the same meaning they know to enable the group could learn additional languages.

MEMORYPOLY:

• Facilitators can ask participants to comment on the aesthetics of the furniture regarding:
  • Colours’ matching
  • Style
  • Quantity of  furniture items (too much? Too few?)
  • Usefulness of furniture items
  • Other furniture items needed
• Discover and memorise the place with mnemotechnic (associative memorising) or method of loci, then tell about your “route” to your peer.
• Who might live here? Invent a story and tell it to the group as a game when you go round a circle and each person adds something, can be really creative and great fun!
• Facilitators can ask learners to find associations to the rooms.  E.g. Kitchen – nutrition, family, gathering, health, warmth, etc.
• Facilitators can ask learners to come up with as many works starting with a room’s first letter as possible. E:g. Library – lion, lettuce, life. literature, length, love, lorry, letter, living, etc.

DESIGN AGENCY:

• Each player could explain why he/she designed the room in this or that way. What are the advantages, individual preferences, family needs etc. that are behind the “room design”?
• After the game the group could try to describe the person/family which is living in the house where the room of the game is located.
• Create your own story and trigger memories of childhood, family life and fashions and styles of the last few decades.