Brain power enhancing tricks? Another study on the connection between lifestyle and dementia risk published in December 2013 in PLoS One, found that people who participate in multiple healthy behaviors significantly reduce their risk for dementia. For 30 years, the study tracked five healthy lifestyle behaviors — nonsmoking, optimal body mass index (BMI), high fruit and vegetable intake, regular physical activity, and low to moderate alcohol consumption — in 2,235 men and found that those who followed four or all five of the behaviors were about 60 percent less likely to develop cognitive impairment or dementia.
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.
If you’re right-handed, use your left hand (or vice versa) for daily activities such as brushing your teeth and eating. Doing such activities can drive your brain to make positive changes. Think of millions of neurons learning new tricks as you finally establish better control of that other hand. Walking on bumpy surfaces, such as cobblestones, improves the vestibular system of the inner ear, which plays a central role in balance and equilibrium. Cobblestone-walking challenges the vestibular system in ways that improve its function, which translates into better balance — the key to preventing serious injuries.
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?” Find more information on neuroscientia.com.
Category Formation is the ability to organize information, concepts and skills into categories, and forms the cognitive basis for higher-level abilities like applying, analyzing, and evaluating those concepts and skills. Categories are the basis of language and organization of the world. Pattern Recognition and Inductive Thinking is a special ability of the human brain to not only find patterns, but figure out in a logical way what those patterns suggest about what will happen next. In a broad sense, pattern recognition and inductive thinking form the basis for all scientific inquiry.