Developing your brain power tricks

Improving your memory tips? Similarly, your brain’s cognitive reserve — its ability to withstand neurological damage due to aging and other factors without showing signs of slowing or memory loss — can also benefit from exercise, both physical and cognitive. Just as weight workouts add lean muscle to your body and help you retain more muscle in your later years, researchers now believe that following a brain-healthy lifestyle and performing regular, targeted brain exercises can increase your brain’s cognitive reserve.

Generally, it’s just a matter of deciding to do something good. Develop the habit of finding a good deed to do each day. Set aims and goals and follow through with them to attain them. By setting goals and gradually working to attain them, you will grow mentally. At the end of each day, write down five things for which you are thankful. It looks simple, but it’s a game changer. Finishing your day on a good note will confirm that you look back on it with a sense of achievement and contentment, making it easier for you to get up and go to work the next morning.

Developing better habits of careful listening will help you in your understanding, thinking, and remembering. Reconstructing a song requires close attentional focus and an active memory. When you focus, you release brain chemicals such as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which enables plasticity and vivifies memory. Playing an instrument helps you exercise many interrelated dimensions of brain function, including listening, control of refined movements, and translation of written notes (sight) to music (movement and sound).

I, for one, am predominantly an auditory learner; I best recall and digest information when I can hear it spoken aloud. I encountered this when I shifted from my first job in banking to my current role in real estate. Today, my success is dependent upon my ability to memorize not only the names of my clients and their children, but also the agents whom I work with, other professional connections, and any significant changes that occur in each of their lives — including marriages, moves, and career shifts. This information comes to me through genuine conversations and requires a great deal of active listening. Discover even more information on 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.