Revolutionize Your Retirement Radio

Memory Training: Developing Confidence in Your Abilities with Dorian Mintzer and Dana Steinova

• Dorian Mintzer

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:05:43

One unique way to help seniors feel great about themselves is via memory training. In this episode, Dana Steinova discusses her memory training approach based on mnemonics. Its power is in its ability to change the mindset of people who suffer from memory lapses and people who are giving up, accepting their memory problems as inevitable or something that belongs to the natural aging process. Her program convinces the participants that, in reality, they have tremendous mental potential. They activate special circuits in the brain that people unfamiliar with such techniques leave idle. The program works because cognitive and social effects are so connected. People learn to remember well and usually don't resist performing their new skills in front of family members or friends.

Once people get proof that they can remember well, they start to approach any new information with a positive expectation that they will remember it, which affects the result. The outcome is that they minimize memory lapses in daily life. They do not need any calendar because they keep the entire year in their mind and can tell you what day of the week is any date in the current year. They can easily remember a shopping list with 150 items or any line of digits, and they improve their ability to remember faces and names.

In this episode, participants will discover how to:

  • Use mnemonics rather than memorization to make memories more durable
  • Minimize memory lapses.
  • Exercise new parts of the brain and build our brain reserve to help in the case of stroke, brain injury, or onset of dementia.

About Dana Steinova:

Dana Steinova travels the world training memory trainers. Based in Prague, she is a specialist in organizing educational activities. She is also the very active secretary general of the European Federation of Older People (EURAG), created in 1962, with 156 member associations in 33 European countries.

She holds degrees from the Institute of Enlightenment, the Economics University, and the Charles University in Prague. She has, over the past 30 years, initiated a wide variety of programs, including the U3A movement in the Czech Republic (1986), reciprocal senior student exchanges with more than 42 exchanges within its first ten years (1991), and founding the first intergenerational non-vocational "University of Free Time" (1993) in the Czech Republic.

She is fascinated by neuroscience and has been deeply involved with memory training since 1993. She founded the Czech Society for Memory Training and Brain Jogging in 1998 and later, the EURAG Memory Training Center in Prague in 2002 with the objective of making training opportunities available worldwide. Since then she has traveled the world extensively to achieve this objective. She organized the first National Day of Memory Training as a part of Brain Awareness Week, the worldwide event launched in 2005 by the DANA Alliance of the Brain and which takes place in March every year. In 2008 it became the National Week of Memory Training and has been growing ever since. In 2016, 309 free lectures were held throughout the Czech and Slovak Republic, attended by 7,781 persons.

Get in touch with Dana Steinova:

Visit Dana's website: https://www.trenovanipameti.cz/eurag-memory-training-center/  

What to do next: