Anyone can exercise their calf, glute, bicep and core muscles. These muscles are critical to daily activities, but the most important part of the body that is sometimes forgotten is the brain. Can that be exercised?
Many people believe that using various strategies to exercise your brain can ultimately make you smarter.
At the age of 55, cognitive decline becomes more common; at that age, your brain starts to shrink.
The hippocampus, which is a critical region for memory, starts shrinking one to two percent each year.
This idea also relates to the fact that one in nine people develop Alzheimer’s disease by the age of 65.
In the United States, people have been known to enter themselves into “brain training” regimes in an attempt to reverse, or at least slow, these numbers.
The question is to be considered again: can these regimes help people exercise their brains?
Our brains and their cognitive regions are capable of change at any age. Thanks to its neuroplasticity, the brain can remodel itself in response to many situations.
Years ago, a study conducted by BBC and Cambridge University’s neuroscientists entertained the idea of training your brain.
They called these practices “brain gymnastics” and sought to determine whether doing these brain puzzles made participants smarter in general or gave them specialized skills to perform certain tasks.
BBC researchers conducted another study to find answers. They recruited 11,430 viewers to participate in their online program.
All subjects were admitted into different groups; each group was meant to test different skills, like attention, short-term memory and mathematics.
Each subject took an IQ test before and after the testing; members of all groups showed improvement in performing the tasks involved in the tests they took, but there is no evidence to support the idea that the brain training made them smarter in a general sense.
An important aspect of training your brain is adjusting your attitude about your own intellect and learning processes.
Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck said that when children believe their intellect is important, they express a desire to learn.
Dweck and her colleagues performed an experiment with seventh graders that were labeled as low-achieving. These students attended a seminar that discussed how the brain works and then they were placed into two separate groups, an experimental group and a control group.
The experimental group was taught about the growth mindset, or how the brain grows as they learn to make them smarter. The students in this group were also taught how to apply this knowledge to their schoolwork.
The control group was simply taught about the stages of memory.
Three times as many students in the experimental group showed an increase in effort and engagement in their schoolwork compared with those in the control group.
After the study, those in the experimental group showed a clear rebound in their grades, while those in the control group continued to show declining or poor grades.
This study had large implications on the education of children; teachers should encourage students to think of the mind as something that can always be changed, even improved.
When it comes to exercising the brain, yes, there are different ways to do so, especially at different ages.
I believe the brain is one of those wonderful things about which we will never learn everything. Teaching the brain new things and changing your attitude about it are only a few ways of exercising it and increasing its strength.
