Brain power developing tricks? So what types of exercises benefit your brain? Research shows that when it comes to keeping your mind sharp, exercising your body as well as your mind and sticking to healthy habits is the ideal formula. A study published in July 2019 in The Journal of the American Medical Association followed 196,383 participants age 60 and older who did not have cognitive impairment or dementia when they joined the study and tracked data for eight years on factors such as current smoking status, regular physical activity, healthy diet, and moderate alcohol consumption. They found that a healthy lifestyle was associated with a lower dementia risk among participants, regardless of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
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.
Interacting face-to-face with other people engages all senses and requires attentiveness to both visual and auditory cues. Recent studies show that active social lives lead to lower risk of dementia. Dialogue is often unpredictable and requires active listening and response. Actively challenging your peripheral vision improves brain performance and helps you navigate the world safely. Recent studies shows that drivers stay on the road longer and have fewer accidents after actively training their useful field of view.
It may seem counterintuitive, but when I prioritize what I commit to memory, I don’t focus on the most important information first. Instead, I prioritize the newest information. Studies indicate that committing something to memory as soon as you learn the information could be more beneficial than trying to add it to your memory bank after doing something else. This is because when you shift your focus from one bit of information to the next, you slow down your memory encoding for the first item you were dealing with. Whether I’m attempting to retain faces or facts, shifting the focus from importance to newness helps fresher details stick for the long term. Instead of asking myself, “How important is it that I remember this?” I ask myself, “What can I do right now to remember this later?” Read even more info at Neuroscientia.
Multiple Simultaneous Attention is the ability to multitask with success. It is the ability to move attention and effort back and forth between two or more activities when engaged in them at the same time. It makes demands on sustained attention, response inhibition and speed of information processing, and also requires planning and strategy. Working Memory refers to the ability to remember instructions or keep information in the mind long enough to perform tasks. We use simple working memory when we look at a phone number and keep it in mind while we dial it. Working memory is the sketch pad of the mind where we put things to think about and manipulate.