Moore - Brain workout: tips and techniques to train your mind

BRAIN
WORKOUT

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (180382)

Gareth Moore

BRAIN
WORKOUT

Tips and Techniques
to Train your Mind

CONTENTS

FOR MY MUM AND DAD

INTRODUCTION

Keeping your brain fit is an essential part of a healthy life. Training your mind will not only help you get your head around facts and figures better, but will also enrich your experiences and counteract the effects of ageing. This book will help you discover just what your brain is capable of, and show you how to achieve this. It will challenge you with enjoyable mental gymnastics that demonstrate how, unlike physical training, working to achieve brain fitness is always fun!

GREY MATTER MATTERS

The great gift of the human brain is our ability to think and abstract, and work out new ways to do things. Computers can calculate a thousand prime numbers in the time it takes you to pick up your pen, but in general they cant even begin to scrape at the surface of what you can do on your own by simply sitting and thinking. In , we look at just how amazing the brain is.

Our brains dont just keep us alive: they embody every aspect of our conscious and unconscious thought. They learn and adapt to our changing needs without our even being aware of the fact. These adaptations can be temporary, such as correcting our vision as we move from a light to a dark room, or permanent, as when rebuilding mental faculties after a serious stroke. So keeping your brain fit and healthy is every bit as important as looking after the rest of your body.

Plenty of evidence shows that suitable brain exercises lead to increased mental fitness faster thought processing, greater suppleness and agility of mind, and sharper responses. Our brains have enormous capacity big enough to cope with two lifetimes, let alone one. By training spare neural pathways in different ways of thinking, we can build on existing skills and develop new ones, expanding our intellectual capability.

As we age, our brains gently start to slow down, both in reaction time and in the raw speed of our learning, but we can easily compensate for these changes: the more of life weve experienced and stored in all that spare space, the smarter we are. Expanding our mental faculties, at no matter what age, provides a buffer against decline. It also equips us to cope better with the ever-changing challenges of life, from using new technology, to multi-tasking, to perceiving the truth behind political spin.

ITS FUN TO STAY MENTALLY FIT

Physical fitness training involves serious effort and a need to take care to avoid injury. Keeping your brain fit is much easier! Whereas our bodies become toned and strong through repeating the same exercises, our brains thrive on novelty. Upgrading your mind is all about challenging yourself with new concepts and experiences. Anything you can do with only minimal thought will fail to stretch you.

, we take a look at how you can improve a wide range of mental skills in day-to-day life.

JOINED-UP THINKING

As we will see, mental activity draws on a range of skills. For example, just listening to someone speak requires you to process the incoming sounds, recalling from memory the speech fragments and the words that include them, and perhaps observe the persons facial expression. Misheard words may need correcting, and understanding the sentence itself could require further recall and thought. Youre using vision, hearing, memory, comprehension and logic, just to work out whats being said. Because of the brains complex interconnectivity, skills or knowledge that we acquire in one area can also be applied in other areas. The quiz about the planet Pluto on , for example, is primarily an exercise in comprehension, but it will engage your memory, your general knowledge and your numerical skills, too.

The way you approach any mental problem will be influenced by what you already know, and by how your brain has been trained to think (consciously and subconsciously) in the past. Vitally, this cross-fertilization we look at how you can bring together a range of skills in order to solve tricky problems both puzzles and real-world challenges.

THE PATH TO A WELL-TONED MIND

Improving your mental fitness does not need to involve a lot of time. Even just a few minutes a day can make a huge difference depending, of course, on how much exercise your brain normally receives in your typical daily routine. Improvements are quantifiable and have been shown to last for 10 or more years, and there is abundant evidence that the more you train, the better your brain.

Whenever you can, set aside five minutes or so every day to do some of the exercises in this book. And however busy you are, follow the ideas for challenging your brain in the course of your regular routine, so that you integrate mind-stretching into your normal activities with minimal effort.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning,
not possession but the act of getting there,
which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (17771855)

This book will set you on the path to a well-toned mind, but that should be just the beginning. More than anything, what you can learn here is that the very act of challenging your brain will help it grow and expand its capabilities, in often unexpected ways. Enjoy the puzzles, follow the hints and tips on applying your brain training in practical ways, but, most of all, use what youve learned as a springboard for devising your own mental challenges and enriching your unique understanding of the world.

Each of us possesses one of the most complex and remarkable pieces of equipment in the known universe a human brain. This chapter outlines how the brain functions and reveals the origin of our astonishing mental capabilities.

The chapter begins with a look at the structure of the brain, and at the intricate network of connections that makes complex thought possible. Next come tips on keeping the brain healthy and improving mental fitness. The chapter also includes a look at two skills that are fundamental to both problem-solving and negotiating daily life memory and multi-tasking.

There was once a fear that computers might outstrip human thinking. Yet the more science reveals about the brains functions, the more we discover about our amazing natural capacities and see we have little to fear.

THE SPEED AND POWER OF YOUR BRAIN

Your mobile phone can process around 25 billion instructions per second. This may sound a lot, but best estimates put our own processing capacity at around 100 trillion instructions per second far more powerful.

Unlike machines, however, we cant focus all of our processing power on a single task we need to keep breathing, stay balanced, keep listening and seeing, and so on, all at the same time. This means were stuck with relatively slow arithmetic, an inability to remember everything we might want to, and a whole gamut of sometimes unwanted distractions, such as our emotions.

Nevertheless, we can learn to take better advantage of the processing power our brain does make available to us. One way to understand this capability is to take a look at whats inside your head, to help you realize just how remarkable your brain is.

NEURONS, SYNAPSES AND GIANT SEA SLUGS

The brain comprises two main types of cell: nerve cells, or neurons, which carry information, and a much larger number of glial cells, which perform key support functions. Neurons receive all the sensory information from our body not just sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste, but also balance, pain, motion, temperature, and much more. Each neuron communicates with thousands of others, in a complicated web of connections that makes us capable of everything from breathing to conscious thought.