How’s Your Brainpower?
It’s funny how we forget about our brain sometimes.
We try and take care of our bodies with exercise but seem to altogether overlook the fact that our brain needs exercise too.
As America ages, we’re finally seeing an increase in programs and even “head health” facilities that focus on increasing mental capacity and keeping our minds sharp.
Skeptical? Consider this, Do you ever want to say something but just can’t find the word? (I thought so.)
We all have some mental weaknesses. I exhibit mine at least 10 times a day!
Brain fitness is real. And the more fit you can keep your noodle, the more successful you will be in life, business, and anything else.
There are many new tools popping up to help increase your brain power. An example of this is “Brain Age” and “Brain Training” by Nintendo. Additionally, over the next several years you will see “brain gyms” popping up throughout the country.
But you really don’t need to buy a product or hit the brain gym to sharpen your skills.
Here are some brain exercises recommended by Dr. Lorne Label of the Brain Longevity Center:
- Use your left hand, if you are right handed, for tasks such as placing a stamp on an envelope, writing, or combing your hair.
- Name the letters of the alphabet but mix it up—by skipping every other letter (a, c, e, g); skipping every third letter (a, d, g) or, perhaps, starting from the end of the alphabet and skipping a letter (z, x, v)
- Sweep your eyes across a room. Then spend the next few minutes recalling what you saw, where things were placed, the colors, etc.
- Subtract 3 from 100; then continue to subtract 3s from each remaining number (100-3=97-3=94-3=91)
- Pick a category, like food or animals. Then name an item in the category. Think of a second one that begins with the last letter of the previous item. (For example, hot dog, grape, egg.)
According to a five year study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 2,000 adults showed that simple mental exercises improved cognitive skills.
Why am I delving into this today? It’s simple. Smart people experience more success than the dummies out there!
Pay attention to your brainpower and work on simple ways to stay smart and get mentally fit.
I think I’ll try a crossword puzzle today!
Tags: brain power, Business, Entrepreneurship, productivity, Success
February 9th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
A TV interview about my new book — “Increase Your Brain Power” — and its positive values can be viewed at http://www.wfsb.com/video/18631985.
February 12th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Excellent examples of simple exercises we can do to strengthen our brain muscle, because it is a muscle. And like a muscle we need to use it otherwise it will become weak.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Hello,
I would like to add some comments to the message of brainpower. To keep our brainpower alive as long as possible is a real challenge in our modern society. More and more people suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia. Both are not exclusively limited to elderly people anymore. Middle aged and even young people are affected from memory decline. As this has been a rapidly increasing problem for the last 2 to 3 decades it should give us food for thought.
The symptoms follow the simple rules of cause and effect. Reduced brainpower is the latter but actually only a secondary one. Let’s have a glimpse at the cause.
We all know that many people suffer from arteriosclerosis. The diameter of blood vessels decreases by-and-by. Even the aorta gets affected and the smaller the vessels the faster the process.
The brain is a tremendous network of vessels. The smallest ones are the capillaries. If arteriosclerosis already affects big vessels then the capillaries get affected too but still faster. The consequence is the brain gets less fed and its performance decreases.
We could come to the conclusion that we found the cause but arteriosclerosis is a cause and an affect in one. Consequently we need to ask what causes arteriosclerosis. The answer has been well known for at least a whole century: It’s the malnutrition of our society. Too much fat, too much animal and too much industrial food are the true, the root cause of arteriosclerosis. In other regions where people eat to live Alzheimer’s and dementia are nearly unknown.
If we stop living to eat and start eating to live, eat more fresh and natural food and reduce the risk factors of food we can turn this undesirable development around. Medicine has proven that arteriosclerosis can completely disappear within 1 to 3 years if the nutrition is adjusted accordingly.
It sounds too easy but optimizing the daily diet is a real chance to improve our health. The right nutrition lets us enjoy our brainpower until the end of our days and can at least prevent dementia from getting worth. It might even be possible to improve it. I have been treating my mother now for a couple of weeks and we see first positive results.
Whether it’s dementia, allergies or MS, the basics and the procedure of modifying and optimizing our diet to improve our health are the same and universal and everyone can benefit from it.
Food was never intended to be fun but to nourish us and keep us healthy - you, too.
Check my home study course on nutrition.
Joel Ullisperger
M.Sc. Nutrition
March 10th, 2009 at 6:17 am
When my son was very young we would play the “I have a number between 1 and 100″ game, you would try to find the number in the least amount of time. First divide 100 in have by saying 50, if they say higher or lower you would divide that number in half, so if it were higher you say 75, if they say lower divide 75 in half which is 62 until you identify the number you are thinking about. My son went on to graduate in Mathematics at Ohio State University and now is preparing to be an accuary with an insurance company! The mind has power, mental power exercise it well.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Fastastic ideas. I’m going to add you on my favorites.