Brain exercise

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Will that facelift get you a pay raise? Cosmetic surgery and your career Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

There are lots of ways to get good brain exercise, but the bottom line is you have to use it or you're going to lose it. For brain exercise, you can work on crossword puzzles, play strategy games on the PC, or engage in social games (there are studies that actually show bingo helps enhance the brain function of senior citizens). If bingo has a healthy function, then imagine what great effects you would have from activities that actually engage more than 2 percent of your brain. Writing essays is an excellent way to practice your brain function, and of course reading is outstanding.

This is all initiated by their loss of brain exercise. Brain exercise can have a huge impact on your longevity, and it's perhaps one of the best anti-aging strategies you can pursue. Now, you'll notice all these strategies I've mentioned here are based on transforming yourself from the inside, not changing your external appearance. There's a great tendency in our society today to focus on the external appearance.

Natural Health Solutions Mike Adams See book keywords and concepts

By the way, watching television doesn't qualify as brain exercise. Exercising your brain means doing things like engaging in social interaction, reading, and working strategy puzzles like crossword puzzles or Sudoku—the Japanese brain teaser that has you fill a grid with numbers. Even playing bingo counts as brain exercise—at least more exercise than watching television. In terms of nutrition for the brain, there are many, many supplements that are good for brain function.

Will that facelift get you a pay raise? Cosmetic surgery and your career Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Now, let's move on to perhaps the most important thing you can do to boost brain function and appear younger: engage in brain exercise and avoid those activities that dumb you down. So, right off the bat here we've got to mention television. If you spend a lot of time watching television, you are dumbing down your brain. There's no question about it. The more TV you watch, the older you get in terms of brain function. You can bet an employer won't like you hanging around if you can't remember what jobs you're supposed to do, even if you do have black hair and great-looking skin.

If you took a biological measurement of your age, you can actually reverse that biological age through outstanding nutrition, physical exercise, brain exercise, herbal supplements and so on. You can't do that with cosmetics. All you can do is cover up your age, and the older you get the more you have to cover up. In fact, popular cosmetics are made with such dangerous ingredients that they actually impair your health, can create liver toxicity, clog up skin pores and introduce a lot of toxic chemicals into your system causing you to age faster.

St. John's Wort proven more effective than antidepressant drugs for treating depression Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

The only way to achieve a high state of health is to pursue a healthy lifestyle through nutrition, physical activity, exposure to natural sunlight, strong social interaction, brain exercise, good breathing, staying away from environmental toxins, and so on. But while the study shows St. John's Wort to be more effective than antidepressant drugs, an educated naturopathic physician or nutritionist may not suggest that you simply switch from antidepressants to St. John's Wort. That is still an allopathic approach.

Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin See book keywords and concepts

Discoveries like these are the basis of a new theory of brain exercise. Just as cross training helps you maintain overall physical fitness, Neurobics can help you take charge of your overall mental fitness. Neurobics aims to help you maintain a continuing level of mental fitness, strength, and flexibility as you age. The exercise program calls for presenting the brain with nonroutine or unexpected experiences using various combinations of your physical senses—vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing;—as well as your emotional "sense.

Neurobics is very different from other types of brain exercise, which usually involve logic puzzles, memory exercises, and solitary practice sessions that resemble tests. Instead, Neurobic exercises use the five senses in novel ways to enhance the brain's natural drive to form associations between different types of information. Associations (putting a name together with a face, or a smell with a food, for example) are the building blocks of memory and the basis of how we learn. Deliberately creating new associative patterns is a central part of the Neurobic program.

Memory Existing programs for brain exercise have ignored this powerful associative route to forming and retrieving memories. Neurobics seeks to access it by providing the cortex with the raw material that will create new and potent associations. Because each memory is represented in many different cortical areas, the stronger and richer the network of associations or representations you have built into your brain, the more your brain is protected from the loss of any one representation.1 Take the common problem of remembering names.

Because routine behaviors are almost subconscious, they are carried out using a minimum of brain energy—and provide little brain exercise. The power of the cortex to form new associations is vastly underutilized. If you drive or walk to work via the same route every day, you use the same brain pathways. The neural links between brain areas required to perform that trip become strong. But other links to areas that were initially activated when the route was novel—such as a new smell, sight, or sound when you rounded a certain corner—get weaker as the trip becomes routine.

Such passive stimulation of the senses, however, doesn't work as a brain exercise and neither does repeatedly doing the same routine activities. Neurobics is neither passive nor routine. It uses the senses in novel ways to break out of everyday routines. Our Underused Senses Our five senses are the portals, or gateways, through which the brain gets its entire contact with the outside world. We rely primarily on our senses of vision and hearing because they quickly tell us a lot about our environment. Our other senses—smell, taste, and touch—are less frequently and obviously called upon.

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ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.