Healthy Everytime

The human brain is incredibly active. It’s constantly monitoring, adjusting and repairing the physical body to facilitate optimum performance. This massive activity gives rise to the mind that according to research produces over 60.000 thoughts every day. It is constantly busy associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data to keep you on top of your game in a competitive and challenging world.

This constant mental activity is one of the biggest obstacles to good focus and concentration.

It can be very difficult to focus and concentrate when thoughts and emotions are always interfering with our attention. But this is the normal way by which the brain and mind work.

It’s good to know that the brain behaves much like a muscle. The more you train it the stronger it gets, so to make it more powerful you exercise it like you would a regular muscle.

To most people the brain does not feel as if it’s a muscle, it’s just an organ in the head that stores memories and enables thinking. But I assure you that with proper guidance and training you will soon discover that it behaves very much like a muscle. As you start to exercise it you will start to feel it. You discover that you can do more things with your brain and mind than you ever thought was possible.

Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don’t use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive skills as it is for muscles.

Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to remodel its structure and function in response to outside stimuli. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change the brain’s anatomy. Brain plasticity is at its peak with infants, when brains are most capable of adjustment but researchers have found that the brains capacity to change remains throughout life.

Scientists have discovered that the physical structure of the brain changes in response to mental exercise. Brain cells change or strengthen their connections and even form new ones. Some physical changes may occur within seconds or they may take hours or days.

You can develop specific abilities just by practicing certain exercises that affect the areas of your brain where these abilities reside. Scientists have already created programs for learning-disabled children by using this technology.

The mental patterns that get the most attention get stronger and more persistent. As you get older they become more ingrained, habitual and fixed, and you become more and more of the same.

In order to keep your memory sharp, it has been thought that you have to grow new dendrites. Decades ago, it was discovered that we can grow new dendrites, the microscopic tentacles that reach out from each neuron to make connections with other neurons. If you repeat something you have learned, your neural pathways will become more and more efficient in that part of the brain. Work hard on solving logical problems, math and language to power up your left-brain. Work on abstract, spatial or emotional problems to make your right brain more powerful. And last but not least work on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks to develop your brains master muscle, the frontal lobes.

You go to the gym and use the equipment there to exercise and train specific muscles. The same applies to your brain. You use specific “mental weights” to exercise certain areas of the brain, and the mental muscles you want to make more powerful.