Brain Fitness Home Workout

Brain Fitness Home Workout

Curious about brain fitness programs? Is there anything to them besides smoke and mirrors? I have been using four of them, and I like them, and I believe that they work. Dr. Simon Evans and Dr. Paul Burghardt from the University of Michigan have written an informative e-book that explains how brain fitness can be induced or practiced. Their e-book draws on their professional expertise to explain in a humorous way that brain fitness is certainly something we can cultivate.

Want just a chapter, and not the e-book? No problem, but for $17.00, how can you go wrong?

Remember, everything starts in the brain. That is correct, if you want to pick up a fork to eat apple pie, your brain is what moves your body and picks up the fork.Once you have read the book, look for links below to exceptional brain fitness tools used and recommended by me.

"Dr. Simon Evans and Dr. Paul Burghardt draw from their brain science research and extensive speaking experience to mix important health messages with an entertaining journey into your brain and mind.

BrainFit For Life will motivate, educate and delight you on your way to a healthier brain and more enriched life. After all, thoughts are things. They are electrical and chemical pulses that change your brain by their very existence. BrainFit for Life gives you the tools to change your brain for the better and achieve life-long brain health and fitness."

Thoughts about your perceptions do change your life, and fast. You change your hormonal bath with a thought twice as fast as you can blink your eyes. (You may have dated your significant other for a long time, and when you made the words "I love you", your life changed didn't it)?

Brainfit for Life-A Users Guide to Life Long Brain Health and Fitness

From the Harvard Business Review, November of 2007. A brain fitness home workout primer.

"Until recently, however, there seemed to be no guidelines for active efforts you could make to stay mentally healthy.

There were no brain exercises—no mental push-ups—you could do to stave off the loss of memory and analytic acuity that comes as you grow older.

In the worst-case scenario, you could end up with Alzheimer’s disease, for which there are no proven treatments.

But a concentrated commitment of resources by the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Library of Congress during the 1990s—which the White House proclaimed the “decade of the brain” to heighten public awareness of the need for neuroscience research—yielded a broad front of research and training that has upended some deeply held beliefs about the brain.

One such belief is that the brain necessarily diminishes with age.

It turns out that neurons, the basic cells that allow information transfer to support the brain’s computing power, do not have to die off as we get older.

In fact, a number of regions of the brain important to functions such as motor behavior and memory can actually expand their complement of neurons as we age.

This process, called neurogenesis, used to be unthinkable in mainstream neuroscience.

What does all this have to do with you? The process of neurogenesis is profoundly affected by the way you live your life.

The brain’s anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can all be strengthened and improved through your experiences and interactions with your environment.

The health of your brain isn’t just the product of negative and positive childhood experiences and genetic inheritance; it reflects your adult choices and experiences as well. That’s extremely good news.

Sigmund Freud and those who followed him both in the neurological sciences and in the psychoanalytic tradition thought for years that brain development ceased in childhood or early adolescence.

Although these periods do hold the greatest potential for neural development, we now know there is a regimen you can follow to retain and even build mental capacity as you age.

Brain-imaging studies indicate, for example, that acquired expertise in areas as diverse as playing a cello, juggling, speaking a foreign language, and driving a taxicab expands and makes more communicative the neural systems in the parts of the brain responsible for motor control and spatial navigation.

In other words, you can make physical changes in your brain by learning new skills.

You can even make changes in how your brain functions by exercising conscious will.

In a recent experiment using real-time brain imaging, scientists demonstrated that individuals learned to mitigate the sensation of pain by consciously controlling the observable activity of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain involved in pain processing.

In theory, therefore, it’s possible for people to alleviate pain through neurofeedback, without drugs.

These advances in neuroscience suggest that there is no reason why your brain at 60 can’t be as competent as it was at 25.

That would not have been news to thinkers such as Socrates, Copernicus, and Galileo, who were all still at the peak of their intellectual powers in their sixties and seventies.

Nor would it surprise business leaders such as Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, and Sumner Redstone.

These icons and others like them have intuitively understood that the brain’s alertness is the result of what we call cognitive fitness—a state of optimized ability to reason, remember, learn, plan, and adapt that is enhanced by certain attitudes, lifestyle choices, and exercises.

The more cognitively fit you are, the better you will be able to make decisions, solve problems, and deal with stress and change.

Cognitive fitness will allow you to be more open to new ideas and alternative perspectives.

It will give you the capacity to change your behaviors and forecast their outcomes in order to realize your goals.

You can become the kind of person your company values most. Perhaps more important, you can delay senescence for years and even enjoy a second career.

Exercising Your Brain: A Personal Program

So how can you become cognitively fit? Drawing selectively from the rapidly expanding body of neuroscience research as well as from well-established research in psychology and other mental health fields, we have identified four steps you can take.

These steps are by no means exhaustive. They overlap and reinforce one another. Together they capture, we believe, some of the key opportunities for maintaining an engaged, creative brain. The four tools that Gilkey and Kilts recommend for brain fitness home workout?

Work hard at Play.

Seek Novelty.

Use Experience to Grow Your Brain

Search for Patterns.

You should see what the Open Education Folks say about this program.

The research behind this program is excellent. If I am going to try a brain fitness home workout program, I want to see some research, and I want to evaluate it.

Would You Share Something That You Are Grateful For?

When I was beginning my personal growth journey, a wise person told me that when I was feeling resentful or afraid or sad, that I should remember the phrase "gratitude is the attitude" when I was ready to feel better. That phrase has helped me feel better tens of thousands of times.

Would you share what you are most grateful for? Your story could be just what another person is searching for to renew themselves? Thanks.


Have a question and want to talk with a therapist? Call 815-316-2621 for Julie Logan, LCSW, RN. 7121 Windsor Lake Parkway, Loves Park, Illinois 61111 jlogan7264@myway.com