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Ways to power up your brain
This document provides tips for powering up your brain including maintaining high levels of mental activity through brain training, getting plenty of physical exercise, eating a healthy and balanced diet, getting good quality sleep, and having good personal relationships.
Ways to power up your brain
- 1. Ways to PowerUp Your Brain
- 2.
- 4. Maintain high levelsof mental activity
- 5. Get plenty ofphysical exercise
- 6. Have a healthyand balanced diet
- 7. Get good qualitysleep
- 8. Have good personalrelationships
- 9.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Everybody knows that it is important to have a healthy body so you live a long, productive life, but what about your brain health? How can you increase your brain power with your everyday activities? How can you fuel up your brain? Well, you could load up on caffeine and energy drinks for a temporary boost, but I think it is safe to say that we all know that caffeine and energy drinks are detrimental to our health. So let’s look at some sure-fire ways to boost your brain health that are actually good for you and that have scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness.
- #3 Brain Training improves not only our working memory, it also helps in improving our decision making speed. Brain training is often done via laptop, tablet, phone or personal computer. Brain training is often gamified so that it appears to be a leisure activity rather than an educational pursuit or a clinical intervention. Websites like http://www.lumosity.com/ http://www.brainmetrix.com/ and http://www.fitbrains.com/ are examples of brain training.
- #4 Find all 3 objects in 10 seconds.
- #5 Exercising the brain and keeping mentally active is always a good idea, no matter what age you are now. Fun activities like crosswords, Sudoku, or whatever similar activity takes your fancy have long been suspected by neuroscientists to help improve your cognitive ability.
- #6 Physical exercise is a great solution to a wide range of physical, emotional and even intellectual problems. Exercise is free and there are no side effects. Physical exercise increases your blood flow, which in turn increases the amount of oxygen and glucose your brain is receiving. As exercise also involves physical coordination, the brain gets a workout as it coordinates the physical activity.
- #7 There are quite a range of food ingredients that are good for your brain and no end of marketing experts who will try to sell you the extracted ingredient in pill form or added to yoghurt. But the truth is that many food components can increase our mental functioning. Ginkgo biloba (extracted from the ginkgo tree) has good effects on memory. Vegetables such as broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, some berries, and the omega-3 oils found in oily fish (and some grains) appear to improve memory and overall brain function, as do green teas and protein in general. Protein aids in creating mental alertness.
- #8 The brain does not shut off when we are asleep. The brain is at work while you sleep and much of the work is processing the learning that took place that day. Psychologists have long understood that our dreams, for example, are really just a reflection of all the work our brains are doing trying to make sense of all the information we have been taking in but have not yet fully interpreted and made sense of. So if this is true, you really can solve problems and make of sense of things by “sleeping on it.” On the other hand, if you do not sleep properly, you can lose the benefit of your learning experiences. You also will not learn as well the following day. Adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night to benefit fully and perform at their cognitive peak each day.
- #9 One particular form of memory that we practice in relationships of all kinds is known as “transactive” memory, which is a form of memory in which we become expert in one particular type of information and often have sole responsibility for it. For example, at a party your spouse may be excellent at remembering someone’s job and taste in music once he is introduced, but they may be close to useless at remembering faces and names even if they have met someone before. This is why couples often work as a team, with each being relied upon to be expert in their area of talent. While each partner may struggle without the other, together they appear to have no problems at all remembering anything in social situations. Each partner benefits from the relationship in never feeling forgetful and always knowing what to say. It also turns out that the more diverse your friends are in type, the more they challenge you to think creatively. They provide you with information you would not normally have and they give you different perspectives on everything. Your friends figuratively keep your mind open.