Clever Brain

In The Decline of Your Mental Powers we discussed some of the reasons for our brain’s decline and why we lose our brainpower. So what can we do to improve our brainpower?

Brainpower Courses

There are many books, lectures and products on the market designed to help you to improve your brainpower. Most of these lessons contain the same information and give specific exercises that you can do that will help you to have a much clearer focus and be able to think at your very best. These exercises do not typically take much time and if done regularly and properly, can assist in providing you with discipline and be very effective in improving your brainpower.

Omega-3 Fats in Your Diet

Add Omega-3 oils into your daily diet. You can do this by eating the proper fatty fish such as salmon as well as fish products that contain these oils, or by purchasing Omega-3 supplemental capsules.

Develop Your Concentration

It is important that you develop a higher ability of concentration. Many concentration and meditation techniques such as those taught as part of Yoga studies can help you to build up your ability to remain focused. One technique to develop concentration, and thus your brainpower, is to move only your eyes, keeping your head and body still, gazing from point to point. This should be done by moving your eyes once each second and scanning the entire range of your vision at all angles. Doing this exercise daily can help you to build your focus and increase your concentration over just a few weeks.

Positive Thoughts are Positive for Brainpower

Keeping positive thoughts can also help you to improve your brain function. Thinking positively gives you more access to the higher thinking abilities that are already inside you. When you think positive thoughts, you feel better and healthier. Spend some time each day asking yourself emotional-type questions such as what you are grateful for and name the people in your life who make you happy. Positive thoughts can go a long way towards giving you more confidence and producing a higher concentration level.

Develop Both Sides of Your Brain

Most people are right-handed and therefore primarily use the left side of their brain. In order to develop the neural pathways between the two sides of your brain, and therefore increasing your brainpower, you should engage in activities that utilize the other side of your brain as well.

An exercise that can help to broaden your brainpower is to move your mouse pad to the opposite side of your keyboard. If you are right-handed, then move your mouse pad to the left-hand side, and vice-versa. This forces you to use the hand that is not dominant and will stimulate the neural connections in your brain between the right and left hemispheres.

You should strive to perform as many activities as you can with your non-dominant hand. Try brushing your teeth with your right hand if you are left-handed. Studies have proven that those who are ambidextrous, or have the ability to use both hands equally, have ten percent more nerve fibers that join the left and right sides of the brain.

Games to Improve Your Brainpower

Playing computer games is also an excellent way to exercise and stimulate your brain. There are several games such as puzzles, brainteasers, crossword puzzles and strategy games that will stimulate your brain. Chess, checkers and – my favorite – bridge all help to engage strategic thinking and can ultimately improve your brainpower. You should strive to get yourself into a regular schedule of playing these brain-empowering games. Consider playing for fifteen minutes each morning before work to get your brain moving or take crossword puzzles to work with you for your coffee break.

All of these exercises should be practiced regularly. Be sure to set aside some time in your daily routine to do the practices that you feel most comfortable doing. Spending just a few minutes each day can increase your brainpower by ten percent or more within just a few weeks.

In any field of work, it is important to be creative. Being creative means that you have a lot of ideas which can help improve, innovate and develop a better form and function out of a particular object assigned to you. It is sometimes difficult to be creative, as you don’t have the ideas in your head all the time. However, there are instances in which you have to squeeze out all your creative juices for the sake of work, school projects or a particular goal, and because of these, you always have to be prepared.

If you are having trouble coming up with new, original ideas, then here are some helpful tips which can be of great help in building your brain power and increasing your creative juices:

1. Relax. The brain, when pressured to produce results faster, sometimes fails to work at its best, thus you are left with a mental block or a brain cloud. To enable your creativity, take time to breathe and relax. Allowing your brain boosts its potential to work better and faster, and also provide you with new ideas which you can use on your project.

2. Begin with the basics. It can be difficult to be creative when your brain is exposed to a lot of influences-these existing ideas can mingle in your brain and cause confusion, and in turn make it hard for you to think straight. Start with the basic object by taking away its current embellishments, then try to view it from your own angles. From there you can find new concepts and ideas which are from your own head, and not just a mere modification of others’ work.

3. Look for problems. If you are given a particular assignment with an already existing set of ideas, what you can do is to find issues on how to make the assignment better. See what is lacking, what you can add for improvement or even form an image out of your own visions, regardless of the present ideas at hand. Your creative muscle is then stretched and used, and becomes more useful.

4. Change your schedule. The brain becomes complacent whenever it gets used to a particular routine. Like any other muscle, the brain becomes immune to the various things that it encounters while following the routine course it has adjusted to, thus it would be hard to come up with new insights in the long run. You can however prevent this from happening by changing routines, following new schedules, and giving yourself some cheap thrills. When your brain gets excited, it unleashes new ideas and innovations for you to do in order to enjoy that particular moment of excitement, as compared with usual events you follow on a regular day.

5. Expose yourself to new heights. Exercising your creative muscle can also be done by exposing yourself to various influences. Take time to enjoy life by watching a movie, attending concerts, going out and visiting places you have never been to before. By gathering information, you will be able to see new ideas and develop concepts that can help achieve your goal.

6. Socialize. Talking to people also helps a lot in unleashing your creativity. You get to hear to other people’s ideas, see how they voice out their own insights and find areas for better appreciation. This way your ideas won’t only rely on one point of view, but of a multitude of opinions as well.

7. Think about the future. When unleashing your creativity, you not only have to think of the present, but more importantly, the future. Answer the “why” questions involving your simmering concept, and try to come up with other approaches which haven’t been used yet. Besides, if you haven’t thought about that assumption today, somebody else would come up with the same idea sooner or later.

8. Do the locomotion. Your muscles become more functional when they are exposed to moving objects, so try to play with a rubber ball while brainstorming, or write doodles while thinking of new ideas for a particular project.

9. Write down all your bad ideas. If you’re thinking only of the good ideas, you’re actually not being creative, since you have set these concepts in accordance with already existing tastes. Take note of your bad thoughts-given that you have thought of them to be bad or negative, this just means that these concepts haven’t been tested yet to challenge mainstream innovations. The “good” and the “bad” are both subjective-you can actually take advantage of this and make new trends using your bad ideas in the future.

10. Stretch your right brain. The right side of the brain is where your creative muscle is located, and you can help improve its function by using your left body parts. Try to write using your left hand, or reach for things with your left grip. If you can do these things, you may try a much easier activity-breathe out through the left nostril.

Remember that unleashing your creative juices not only develops your brain, but your overall capabilities at your chosen field. Just try to be inspired with a famous quote from Karl Marx: “the philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is, however, is to change it.”