7 Ways to Exercise Your Brain - And Why You Really Need To!

Your brain is responsible for five main cognitive functions:
executive function, memory, attention, language, and visual-
spatial skills. If you already squeeze aerobic exercise into
your schedule (studies recommend at least three times per
week for an hour), then you have a good routine that’s
increasing brain blood flow to critical memory centers and
improving your ability to remember facts. Adding any of the
following cognitive function–building practices will amplify
your brain health benefits:

1. Strategize! Logic and reasoning skills are the basis for
   making decisions and considering possible outcomes of
   your actions. The more you challenge yourself to do these
   kinds of tasks, the more you deepen the neural pathways
   necessary for this type of brain function. If you like games,
   this kind of exercise is right up your alley. Video games and
   strategic board games (such as chess) are great ways to
   engage this aspect of brain training. Other options include
   social interaction or any activity that requires you to identify
   a desired outcome and then calculate choices and develop a
   plan to achieve success.

2. Challenge your memory. You highlight how important
   memory is to your cognitive function every time you read,
   reason, or do any type of mental calculation. Memory is
   also the first place you’ll probably notice your cognitive
   function faltering. Training your memory is incredibly easy
   and can be done while you commute or listen to the radio:
   Commit to learning all the lyrics of a song while you’re
   driving, or memorize a poem while sitting on the bus. Don’t
   commute? Force yourself to do a task by memory. For
   example, wash your face and brush your teeth with your
   eyes closed, or learn to perform a task with your
   nondominant hand.

3. (Re)focus your attention. Attention is one of the
   foundational elements of cognition and it decreases with
   age. Your ability to place your focus (and hold it there),
   however, allows you to concentrate and be productive
   despite distractions, which means this is a part of your
   brain function you want to keep sharp. Increasing this brain
   ability is as simple as changing your routine. Ninety-eight
   percent of what you do every day is habit; changing the
   routine guarantees your brain has to pay attention. There
   are two ways to work this part of your brain muscle: (1)
   Identify what you do by rote day after day and change it.
   That can mean taking a different route to work or school or
   changing your exercise routine (i.e., do the exercises in
   reverse order); (2) When you combine activities that require
   cognitive function, you force your brain to do more in the
   same amount of time. For example, cook and listen to talk
   radio or an audiobook, or drive while making a list of
   groceries in your head.

4. Reset your brain. As important as it is to be able to pay
   attention, sometimes it’s even better to give your brain a
   break. Stilling your mind breaks its rhythm, which causes it
   to refresh. Giving your mind a break allows it to return to
   tasks later with increased perspective and creativity. You
   can think of this as a sort of interval training for your brain.
   Dr. Chapman suggests a “Five by Five” principle “where you
   take a break from whatever you’re doing five times a day
   for at least five minutes to reset.”

5. Buff up your
   lingo.
   Language
   games
   stimulate your
   brain to
   understand,
   remember, and
   recognize
   words. The
   more you practice fluency in language, the more quickly
   your brain will retrieve old words and embrace new ones.
   Taking the time to understand new words in context
   especially trains your brain to remember them, since you
   increase the associations linked with the definition. A simple
   way to engage this process is to read articles outside your
   normal realm of interest. Rather than reading the business
   section of the newspaper, read the sports or science section
   instead.'

6. Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. According to Keir
   Bloomer, chair of the Higher Order Skills Excellence Group,
   “synthesis is the skill of joining up. Essentially, it is the
   process of forming new knowledge or new ideas by taking
   different existing ideas and knowledge, sometimes from
   different areas…. it’s a skill that involves activities like
   linking, connecting, joining together.” To exercise yourself in
   this way, make an effort to process information beyond its
   superficial level. When you read a book or article (including
   this one!), share what you learn with someone else. Rather
   than just recounting the facts, identify and discuss the
   theme(s) in what you read and how they relate to your life.

7. Take a really good look. One of the most dominant
   senses your brain uses to understand and encode your
   experience is your visual sense. Being able to visually
   analyze your environment gives you many cognitive clues
   about how to behave within it. Developing this part of your
   brain muscle can be done in two easy ways: (1) In any
   setting, pick out three items and their location. When you
   leave the setting, close your eyes and see if you can
   accurately remember each item and its location; do this
   again two hours later; (2) For more of a challenge, try
   noticing everything you can see in your full range of vision
   (front and peripheral), then write it all down from recall.
   Considered in these micro-elements, the ease of adding
   brain exercise to your day seems obvious. I think you can
   handle it, so I’m going to sneak in one more surefire way to
   bump up your gray matter: Stop multitasking. Constant
   simultaneous in/output fatigues your brain and leads to
   reduced efficiency and productivity. When you need to focus
   on higher-order thinking (those tasks that really require full
   access to your brain power), you’ll achieve more if you
   allow your focus to remain uninterrupted for at least 15
   minutes at a time.
   All this sounds promising, but understanding the concept
   that your brain can hold off the aging process is a lot like
   buying a membership to the gym: It only helps if you
   actually use it. Which means incorporating these ideas into
   your everyday experience will require a tiny bit of intention
   on your part. If you’ve been reading this while also listening
   to the news on television—an example of combining
   activities that require cognitive function and thus working
   out your ability to pay attention—then you’ve already got a
   good head start.