Brain Health and Wellness

Brain Health and Wellness champions a proactive and lifelong regimen for brain health—not only to build a robust brain but to fight off or delay the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Nussbaum, a licensed clinical neuropsychologist, has more than 15 years experience in the care of older persons suffering from dementia and related disorders. But one of his main points is that these diseases of old age actually begin in childhood, when failure to actively exercise the brain creates the conditions for later brain debilitation.

An expert in neuroanatomy and human behavior, his work describes the kind of lifestyle necessary to maximize successful aging, brain wellness, and disease prevention. "As a society, we tend to pay far more attention to the heart than to the brain," Nussbaum says. "We have prioritized the heart as important to our overall health…many of us belong to aerobic and exercise clubs, grocery stores and restaurants promote foods for the healthy heart, and in our language we romanticize the heart at every opportunity."

We need to be paying the same kind of respect to the human brain, which Dr. Nussbaum calls "the most magnificient system in our universe." In this book he lays the foundation for promoting brain health, and although professionals can certainly learn from the research presented here, the book’s real audience is the general public—which is why the author always moves the discussion away from concepts to actual experience, showing how we can adopt healthy brain habits in our daily lives.