Through its "Maintain Your Brain" campaign, the Alzheimer's Association urges people to regularly engage in mentally stimulating activities. These may involve doing logic puzzles like Sudoku, reading an entire newspaper daily or going to a museum -- anything that takes you outside your normal range of thinking, said Elizabeth Edgerly, a clinical psychologist who helped develop the campaign.

Mental challenges such as these, researchers theorize, build neural pathways in the brain, buffering against age-related loss and possibly an assault by disease. Some researchers have hypothesized that persistent, effortful mental activity might even retard underlying disease.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/20/AR20060220010...