Optimizing Brain Fitness

Transcript is riddled with errors and lapses. Unhappily, Restak's remarks which the transcript should track are neither simple nor crisp. Some of his remarks seem out-of-place; others make no sense. At times continuity and flow are puzzling. His long sentences, trains of thought, and parenthetic comments often trail off into blabbing after-thoughtiness.His subject should interest most people. Unfortunately, Restak includes too much detail for laymen who want to master better focus and recall to use their minds better, plus possibly to stave off Alzheimers. Example? His excessive, dry detailing of brain structures and functions. After some clue why they are being covered, they need a quick once-over. Then he should quickly apply concepts just covered, before moving on to the next key idea.That Restak's remarks seem teleprompted is no flaw. Their wordiness, abstraction, and intellectualised content (not reaching academic journal levels, but heavily warped with that direction) hurt. His tone of voice helps even less. Whoever wants to convey a message, gets attention better thru tone of voice. than by sheer words. Every successful salesman knows to act interested and involved in his product. An infamous yet illustrative example of vivid tone of voice's and body language's effects is Hitler. His rants hardly enthralled huge crowds with factuality or thought content. Emotion is the delivery-system, not the payload.For an idea of my meaning, pick up a novel with a steamy. erotic scene well presented, then read it in monotone. Next read numbers from the phone book with feeling (albeit forced for lifeless numbers). Restak was not entirely monotone, but could have projected more excitement. Had he tried, incongruity between excitement and wordiness, might have struck him, moving him to recompose his dry remarks.Keeping to my assumption that he meant this DVD's content to be used, instead of have viewers just say "Hmmm!" before moving on, he should have used more, relevant visuals and have given viewers more to do after introducing a valuable concept before advancing to the next step. When concepts are many and tightly linked, nailing each down is useful before going to the next one.Finally, fewer and well-chosen words would have conveyed more thought than wordiness alone ever could. What one leaves out oft matters as much as well chosen, well-illustrated essentials. Prof Restak is a very bright MD, who should have no problem shortening his remarks to aim his message at people who respond to emotional tone and who remember well-chosen images much better than they remember words.

Not too much academy or technical speak. I found the teacher very engaging. He is definitely brainy! I learn a lot from him. It will help someone who has the patience and motivation to go through the material (may be a few time) and practice to get result. Perhaps not entertaining enough for some other viewer. But I found it amazing value buying it second hand here on Amazon.

Jury is out, Still working on it have not passed session 5 yet. Good suggestions so far on nutrition and exercise, I found the SLEEP the easiest to fulfill and the most rewarding.

It is probably one of only a very few of such a course. It seems to be as advertised.

This is a good book to help you figure out how to use your brain using various brain and memorization tricks, good cds, and affordable too.

This was good for the most part but the instructor was not a person who keeps your interest. It could have been much more enjoyable.

I’m barely on chapter 6 on the dvd and already implementing a few of the things I learned from it

Far too pedantic, though there are a number of interesting factoids in the lecture. But the professor just didn't seem to have the inspiration necessary to inspire me.