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:
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.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.(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.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.”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.'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.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.
