Daily Times

There’s a strange, flapper-style headband around my temples and a monitor clipped to my ear. In front of me, on a screen, emperor penguins waddle across the Antarctic, eggs balanced between their feet.

Not, perhaps, the most comfortable way to watch David Attenborough’s Planet Earth, but it’s part of a plan to improve my brain. I am at the SHA Wellness Clinic in south-east Spain, a luxurious hideout perched on a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean.

This is where some of Europe’s richest and most influential are now heading for the new must-have treatment – a neurocognitive and brain stimulation programme designed to do for your mind what most spas do for your body.

If I had any doubts about needing some help with my memory before I arrived at SHA, I certainly don’t now. I’ve managed to leave my contact lenses at home.

The brain, like other parts of the body, has a habit of playing up as you get older. But, when other, more visible, body parts fail, we know more or less what we can do (even if we don’t actually do it).

If you start muttering “oof!” when you sit down, you can join a gym, take up yoga or go for brisk walks. But what about when your brain goes “oof!”, the synapses are stuttering and the neurons don’t seem to be firing fast enough? When you go to the shops needing certain things and can’t for the life of you remember what two of them were?

This is where the SHA clinic comes in.

The idea of the brain gym has been around for a while. Lots of us now play games designed to get our neurons going – so many of us, in fact, that the brain fitness market is expected to be worth $20 billion by 2020. And now, the SHA clinic has taken the concept to a whole new level.

Dr Bruno Ribeiro, the Portuguese clinical neuropsychologist and professor at the University of Murcia who is behind the programme, explains, “We are beginning to understand that we can live longer, but there is not enough emphasis, generally, on how we are going to arrive at old age mentally. I believe you can do lots of things not only to prevent brain ageing, but also to slow it.” His programme identifies the aspects of your brainpower that need boosting and then offers the therapies to do just that.

First, he assesses me using some computerised tests. There’s a lot of matching of shapes, reminding me of non-verbal reasoning exams at school and inducing the same sort of low-level panic. I have to strike a rectangle on the screen when a circle close by turns yellow. Other tests involve prodding the screen when a sequence of numbers appears, then remembering sequences and placing shapes on the display.

I’m absolutely terrible at all the remembering exercises. My excuse is that it’s last thing on Friday, it’s been a long week and I have a splitting headache.

Having been at the clinic for 24 hours, I am also caffeine-deprived, and a part of me is thinking, “Is there actually any point to this?”

What with being a fifty-something mother of four children, the youngest aged 16, I generally have so many things to remember that my brain is simply not prepared to take on anything that doesn’t have at least a red alert level. Random shapes just don’t make the cut. Fortunately for me, Dr Ribeiro says, “We all have the potential to improve our brain activity. There are things we can do to act against our genes.” Since I’m convinced my genes are not very good, I am relieved to move on to the next thing, which is the brainwave imaging with John McEnroe-style headband.

We move to the clinic’s plush cinema and, while I watch emperor penguins, a wolf-stalking caribou and polar bear cubs sliding along the ice, Dr Ribeiro measures the Alpha and Beta waves that these images generate in my brain.

The waves reflect different types of electrical activity: the Alpha ones, he explains, reveal my levels of relaxation; the Beta how much I am concentrating. I turn out to be OK at relaxing and concentrating while watching Planet Earth, which I am pleased about, but not really surprised by, because it’s very good. Afterwards, Dr Ribeiro tells me I have no phobias and that I am not worried about my children. Then, astonishingly, he says I am scared of heights. This is true. But I hadn’t consciously registered any heights while I was watching. I am impressed.