The human brain is incredibly active. It's constantly monitoring, adjusting and repairing the physical body to facilitate optimum performance. This massive activity gives rise to the mind that according to research produces over 60.000 thoughts every day. It is constantly busy associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data to keep you on top of your game in a competitive and challenging world. This constant mental activity is one of the biggest obstacles to good focus and concentration. It's hard to focus and concentrate when your thoughts and emotions are constantly interfering with our attention, but the brain and mind are wired this way and it's completely normal. It's good to know that the brain behaves much like a muscle. The more you train it the stronger it gets, so to make it more powerful you exercise it like you would a regular muscle. It may seem strange to think of the brain as a muscle, especially when its main purpose is to store memories and enable thinking. But when you start exercising it rigorously you'll discover just that. You'll be able to do more with your mind than you ever thought possible, just as you would be physically stronger after regular physical exercise. Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don't use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive skills as it is for muscles. Brain plasticity is the brain's natural lifelong capacity for physical and functional change. Basically it is the mechanism that allows the brain to be molded or changed by learning and experience. Research has revealed that this ability to re-generate and re-structure brain cells is active throughout our life. Scientists have discovered that the physical structure of the brain changes in response to mental exercise. Brain cells change or strengthen their connections and even form new ones. Some physical changes may occur within seconds or they may take hours or days. Researchers have found that you can build up specific brain areas by using exercises that affect those areas. There are programs available that use these discoveries to help the learning-disabled. The mental patterns you use the most during your lifetime get more and more ingrained, habitual and fixed as you get older. In the terms of brain and mind activity, you become more of the same. When you really work out your mind, new dendrites grow and form new pathways for information and energy to flow through. Dendrites are thin branch like structures that convey information between brain cells. To make your left-brain more powerful you need to work hard on solving logical problems, math and language. By working hard on abstract, spatial or emotional problems your right brain becomes more powerful. To develop your frontal lobes, the master muscle of your brain, your exercises should focus on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks. To exercise your body you go to the gym where you have specially made equipment to exercise and train specific muscles. The same goes for your brain. To exercise your brain you use "mental weights" to exercise and train the specific mental muscles you want to develop and make stronger.
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