The brain is like a muscle. If you want it to remain fit and active you must give it a work out. Here’s how.
Your brain is a thinking organ that learns and grows by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulation improves brain function and actually protects against cognitive decline.

The human brain is able to continually adapt and rewire itself. Even in old age, it can grow new neurons. Studies suggest that keeping your grey matter in shape can lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In other words, use it or lose it.

The neural pathways and connections in our brains, like all of the other muscles in our bodies, need exercise and training. There are a variety of exercises and activities that can successfully work your cognitive functions on a daily basis.

Cognitive Functions
Our minds consist of five main cognitive functions: memory, attention, language, visual-spatial skills and executive function. It’s important to challenge, stimulate and effectively exercise all five areas to stay mentally sharp as our brains age.

1. Memory
Memory plays a crucial role in all cognitive activities, including reading, reasoning and mental calculation. 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, which can be easier than you think. Listening to music is not only enjoyable, but by choosing a song you don’t know and memorising 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 associations between different neural connections of the brain.

2. Attention
Attention is necessary in nearly all daily tasks. 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 re-organise 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. Combining activities like listening to an audio book while 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. For example, 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 or easier to look up on a dictionary site if you are reading the news online. Take time to understand the word in its context, which will help you build your language skills and retrieve the word more readily.

4. Visual-Spatial skills
We live in a colorful, three-dimensional world. Analysing visual information is necessary to be able to act within your environment. To work this cognitive function, 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 colleague 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 realising 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, yes, 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 – like making it to the final level.


Information provided by Healthy-U limited