7 ways to Improve Your Brain Plasticity
A Brain Fitness Plan
1. Exercise.
Change can only occur when the brain is alert and engaged, so you need to be rested. A tired brain is not a highly functional brain. Stay in good shape, go outside, walk each day, eat good food, enjoy the sun. An active and healthy body means an active and healthy brain.
2. Be Positive because Being Positive Works
Positive Change strengthens connections between neurons engaged at the same time towards a model of perfection. The brain wants to make connections that make your life and itself better, that improve its chance of survival. Knowing you can literally change the physical aspects of your brain means you can change.
3. Learn new things. Cross train, study things in groups.
Neurons that fire together wire together. Studies show your brain lights up when learning something new, and once habit, your brain lights up and the beginning and the end. Challenge yourself, learn a new language, take up a martial art, start painting or write a book, start a business., (www.lifestylebusinessbookclub.com). Training needs to be taxing and systematically improving.
4. Initial changes are just temporary. Incremental engaged steps, bit by bit produce lasting knowledge.
Study a little every time, I study in blocks of twenty minutes switching tasks or subjects, but you need to do a little bit every day, consistency matters. Then test yourself. Training should be incremental.
5. Brain plasticity can be positive or negative (bad habits)
Habits can work either way, good or bad, so be conscious of what you do habitually. What you do daily, you become. Control your habits, know what causes you to do something, the cue to your habit, learn what the routine is, and then know the reward. What do you get out of the habit.
Think about it. Then hack it.
Tweak the cue.
Find a better way to achieve the reward. Also, being part of a group helps reinforce the change.
6. Memory is crucial for learning and can be improved.
Memory is a skill, not a born gift. It takes work and practice.
A quote from Walking With Einstein:
It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.”
More notes on walking With Einstein are here: http://www.darylburnett.com/1/post/2012/03/memory-tips-from-the-book-moonwalking-with-einstein.html
7. Motivation is key. Be Engaged.
What you do needs to be interesting to motivate, if you want it, you will learn it, so much it interesting. Reward yourself when you progress. Have goal, a reason to improve.D
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