Source: 5 Daily Brain Exercises, by Dr. Bernard Croisile. www.askmen. Image: www.pickthebrain.com
1 Memory.
There are several types of memory at work in the brain. Taken together, these are the cognitive skills
we may notice most when they begin to fail. To maintain a good memory, you need to
train for it. Listening to music is not only enjoyable, but by choosing a song you don’t
know and memorizing the lyrics, you boost the level of acetylcholine, the chemical
that helps build your brain, and improve your memory skills. Challenge yourself even
more by showering or getting dressed in the dark or using your opposite hand to brush
your teeth. These challenges help build new associationsbetween different neural con nections of the brain.
2 Attention.
good attention enables you to maintain concentration despite noise and distractions and to focus on several activities at once.
We can improve our attention by simply changing our routines. Change your route to work or reorganize your
desk —both will force your brain to wake up from habits and pay attention again. As we age, our attention span
can decrease, making us more susceptible to distraction and less efficient at multitasking.
By combining activities like listening to an audio book with jogging or doing math in your head while you drive
forces your brain to work at doing more in the same amount of time.
3 Language.
Language activities will challenge our ability to recognize, remember and understand words.
They also exercise our fluency, grammatical skills and vocabulary. With regular
practice, you can expand your knowledge of new words and much more easily retrieve
words that are familiar. If you usually only thoroughly read the sports section, try reading a few in-depth business
articles. you’ll be exposed to new words, which are easier to understand when read in
context. Take time to under stand the word in its context, which will help you build your
language skills and retrieve the word more readily in front of your boss in the future.
4 Visual-Spatial.
Analyzing visual information is necessary to be able to act within your environment. Try walking
into a room and picking out five items and their locations.
When you exit the room, try to recall all five items and where they were located. Too easy?
Wait two hours and try to remember those items and their locations. The next time you’re
waiting on your coworker or friend to arrive, try this mental exercise. Look straight ahead
and note everything you can see both in front of you and in your peripheral vision.
Challenge yourself to recall everything and write it down.
This will force you to use your memory and train your brain to focus on your surroundings.
5 Executive Function.
Without even realizing it, you use your logic and reasoning skills on a daily basis to make
decisions, build up hypotheses and consider the possible consequences of your actions.
Activities in which you must define a strategy to reach a desired outcome and calculate
the right moves to reach the solution in the shortest possible time are actually fun activities you do daily —like social
interaction and video games. Engaging in a brief visit with a friend boosts your intellectual
performance by requiring you to consider possible responses and desired outcomes. Video
games require strategy and problem-solving to reach a desired outcome.
daily brain excercises
