Developing your brain power advices? Your morning newspaper is a great place to start. “Simple games like Sudoku and word games are good, as well as comic strips where you find things that are different from one picture to the next,” says John E. Morley, MD, a professor of medicine in the division of geriatric medicine at St. Louis University in Missouri and coauthor of The Science of Staying Young. In addition to word games, Dr. Morley recommends the following exercises to sharpen your mental skills. Test your recall. Make a list — grocery items, things to do, or anything else that comes to mind — and memorize it. An hour or so later, see how many items you can recall. Make the list as challenging as possible for the greatest mental stimulation.
Keep challenging yourself to learn new things. By doing this, you will gain more knowledge about things around you, and you will learn how to utilize things in a better way. Don’t let yourself get stuck in one place, either mentally or physically. Be proactive, curious, conscious, and informed about the world. Exercising your brain means using it more. Generally, the brain takes part in everything we do, but there are some types of activities which can specifically exercise our brains. Activities like doing puzzles, playing games like Chess or Scrabble, solving numerical problems, studying difficult topics, and challenging your dexterity, spatial reasoning, and logic. Doing these mental exercises daily can sharpen your mind, and it can be an excellent way to strengthens neural links in your brain.
Developing better habits of careful listening will help you in your understanding, thinking, and remembering. Reconstructing a song requires close attentional focus and an active memory. When you focus, you release brain chemicals such as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which enables plasticity and vivifies memory. Playing an instrument helps you exercise many interrelated dimensions of brain function, including listening, control of refined movements, and translation of written notes (sight) to music (movement and sound).
I, for one, am predominantly an auditory learner; I best recall and digest information when I can hear it spoken aloud. I encountered this when I shifted from my first job in banking to my current role in real estate. Today, my success is dependent upon my ability to memorize not only the names of my clients and their children, but also the agents whom I work with, other professional connections, and any significant changes that occur in each of their lives — including marriages, moves, and career shifts. This information comes to me through genuine conversations and requires a great deal of active listening. See additional info on Neuroscientia.
Sustained Attention is the basic ability to look at, listen to and think about classroom tasks over a period of time. All teaching and learning depends on it. Without attention, new learning simply does not happen, and issues of understanding and memory are of no relevance. Response Inhibition is the ability to inhibit one’s own response to distractions. Imagine two children paying close attention to a lesson, when there is a sudden noise in the hallway.The child who maintains attention has better response inhibition.