My weekly education from "This American Life"

Every week, for an hour, I go to class.

It's a part of my Baby Boomer continuing education.

It is said that as we age we need to keep those synapses working, give that cognitive tissue a workout.

We need to keep our minds healthy just as importantly as we need to keep our bodies healthy. Good body health may keep me away from diabetes and heart disease. Good brain health may help keep me away from Alzheimer's. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

To accomplish both, in a true kill two birds with one stone manner, I exercise both my body and my brain by taking a four-mile power walk while listening to a podcast of "This American Life" on National Public Radio.

I look forward to the walk and the way it raises my heart rate, and I look forward to what I'm going to learn from "This American Life" host Ira Glass and his merry band of contributors.

On my most recent walk with Ira in my ears, I learned about parasites, not a subject I would normally approach in the normal cadence of what I do day to day. I learned about the hookworm parasite as a possible cure for allergy sufferers, and it was fascinating.

I'm not making this up.

They did a terrific job -- better than anyone in the media, in fact -- explaining the housing crisis and how it helped bring down Wall Street. For once, I understood stood something about the economy. It was so good that a new group -- Planet Money -- has emerged as a National Public Radio contributor to explain economic-related news in a way that Joe Average like me can understand.

"This American Life" airs on noon each Saturday on my local NPR station. I am not allowed to hear it live. If I'm in the car listening to public radio at the time in comes on the station has to change. That's true in my car and it's true if I'm riding with my wife Jane in her car.

Because I download the episode as a podcast then transfer it to my iPod for my weekly walk with Ira.

The broadcasts are no more than an hour, which fits in to my pace of walking my four miles in under an hour.

I often laugh out loud -- particularly when a contribution from David Sedaris is involved.

And I always learn something new.

This graying brain appreciates it.