You know you’ve got to exercise your brain just like your muscles.
—WILL ROGERS
Once you optimize the physical functioning of the brain, it is then critical to keep it strong. Mental workouts and lifelong learning strategies are essential tools to keep your brain young, agile, and adaptable. One of my friends spends his life teaching people just how to do this. Jim’s real last name is Kwik. Which is uncanny, because today he helps others “speed up” their brain’s processing abilities. His list of clients is impressive, and he flies all over the globe teaching corporations, executives, doctors, lawyers, and students the secrets of how to improve brain function that he once stumbled upon in his lowest moments.
“My inspiration was my desperation,” Jim told me. “I was a young guy, a freshman attending college in New York. And I was struggling. The jump from high school to college was especially tough for me.” Jim was not prepared for the amount of material he was expected to read, assimilate, and regurgitate for his courses. “I worked harder than most of my friends, and this was tough on my self-esteem, as it is for anyone who struggles in school.” At school, like many first-year college students I’ve treated, Jim was in a state of overwhelming stress, the likes of which he’d never known before. He was juggling midterm exams, labs, and writing papers, on top of trying to keep up. He went without sleep and food, studying and reading day and night. One day he simply passed out. “Two days later I woke up dazed and confused, and in a hospital. I had been trying so hard to learn and read everything, until I literally put my brain and body into a state of exhaustion. I was trying to drink water out of a fire hose and was barely surviving.”
Jim thought to himself, “There has to be a better way.” His answer walked in the door, right at that moment, carried by a nurse. She held a hot mug of tea and handed it to Jim. On the cup was a quote by Einstein: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Looking at that quote, Jim got chills down his spine.
Jim was looking at the problem—his need to absorb information—and trying to solve it the same way it was created, by pushing himself harder to absorb more and more. He had been working harder. Now it was time to work smarter. It was in that life-altering moment, when he was vulnerable and open to another way, that he realized, School is great for teaching us what to learn. Where it fails is teaching us how to learn.
Jim began asking himself questions: “How can people learn how to remember things more easily? How do they use their brain to improve their focus? How can I train my brain to better handle the hordes of information coming at me? Is there an easier way than rote learning?”
Our modern minds have to handle more information than ever before in history. For example, information is so fast-paced that it doubles now every two years. We have a half million words in the English language, five times as many words as in the time of Shakespeare. Someone who goes to college for a four-year degree may discover that by their third year of study, much of what they’ve learned is already outdated. There’s more information in one issue of a New York Times than a person in the eighteenth century would have been required to digest in his whole lifetime. If you look at the top in-demand jobs for 2011, most of them didn’t even exist in 2004. That’s a lot of change, a lot of information.
Jim’s pain created questions, which in turn led to life-changing answers. He began studying every book he could find on how to quicken the brain’s ability to learn. What Jim learned radically changed his performance in school. He wasn’t working as hard as before, but he got better grades with less effort. He began to realize that if he could do this, anybody could. “There’s no such thing as people who have better memories than others,” he now tells his students. “There is a trained memory and an untrained memory.”
Science verifies what Jim teaches. With a simple plan you can dramatically improve your brain’s ability to think and remember. But to do this you have to use your brain on a regular basis. Here are some immediate tips to implement in your life.
Dedicate yourself to reading something that interests you for thirty minutes a day. The brain is like a muscle: you need to use it or you will lose your ability to use it. The biggest mental declines happen after we complete our formal schooling and after retirement. Why? Because we are not pushing ourselves to continue to learn, grow, and stretch our neurons. Reading helps the learning continue. People who are in a job that does not require continual learning are at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Turn your car into a “university on wheels.” Listening to audiobooks is another way to keep your mind active and sharp. When I walk, I love listening to the latest audiobook I’ve downloaded to my smartphone, which actually makes me smarter.
Journal every day. You’d be amazed at how many of the great men and women of history kept a journal. Journaling can take many forms, from the conventional pen-and-notebook-style journals to blogging or simply posting meaningful quotes, thoughts, and experiences on social media sites.
Stay childlike when it comes to learning. Jim says, “My ninety-five-year-old grandmother is one of the youngest people I know.” It is because she has kept her childlike curiosity intact. Did you know that preschoolers ask between three hundred and four hundred questions a day? Not only should we never stop asking questions, but we should be actively curious. Ask yourself, “What if?” and then seek out the answers.
Keep your emotional state primed for learning. All learning is dependent upon your emotional state. A brain that is emotionally balanced is ready and primed for learning. When we are bored, cranky, and tired, it doesn’t matter how interesting the teacher might be, we are not going to learn anything new. If we are depressed or stressed or obsessed, all our brain energy is being used to try to prop up our emotions for survival; very little is left for new learning. Use your body to train your mind. The research is conclusive: Exercise helps the brain learn better. We are all pretty familiar with the mind–body connection now. But fewer realize the body–mind connection, or how the body helps stimulate different parts of the brain. For example, Jim teaches people to use their finger or a pen to follow the words on a page. This one simple act of using the body to help the mind read will give you 25 percent increase in speed and focus.
Create a positive learning environment. All learning is “state dependent.” “We learn best,” Jim points out, “when we can get in that state known as flow, when we are alert and relaxed at the same time.” Other scientists call this a concert state: a calm but focused mind, such as when you attend a symphony. Stress is the enemy of learning. We tend to freeze up when stressed and we cannot take in new information or process it well in that mood state. Studies have shown that students score higher on tests of recall and memory after they have been shown a funny movie clip. The laughter relaxes their brain so that it is optimized and open to absorb new information.
It pays to proactively create a positive environment for learning. Rooms that are either too boring or too busy can distract from learning. Good lighting is key. Some people learn better when there is beautiful art or music around. Baroque music that plays at sixty beats per minute has been shown to help learning. Smells actually can anchor learning. Jim has his students learn something new while wearing a particular scent or smelling an essential oil. Later when they take the test or need to recall the information, he asks them to wear the same scent or take a whiff of the essential oil and they’ll recall the information better. The olfactory senses are very tied to memory. We’ve all had experiences of catching a certain scent, like bread baking, and being drawn back to a warm memory.
Mental practice is to the mind what physical exercise is to the body. One way to enhance your brain is to boost your memory skills. Brain cells in an area of the temporal lobes, called the hippocampus, are responsive to training. These are some of the first cells to die in Alzheimer’s disease, so working to keep them young is critical to lifelong brain health.
Jim teaches his clients how to boost their memory abilities. We are all emotionally connected to our names, so when someone remembers our name and addresses us by it, it makes us feel special. Here are some tips that Jim shared, which you can use to help remember people’s names. Note that you can also use these strategies to help you remember other items. The acronym SUAVE spells out the key steps.
S: Say the person’s name. When someone tells you his name, repeat it in a natural way. For example, someone tells you, “I’m Joshua.” Repeat his name in a sentence: “Joshua, nice to meet you.”
U: Use the person’s name. In a natural way, use this person’s name again as the conversation goes on. “Hey, Joshua, can I get you a cup of coffee?” (Remember to use it, but don’t abuse it. If you use his name in every other sentence you’ll start to sound like a salesman about to make a pitch.)
A: Ask questions. This is especially good with unusual names. Ask the person, “How do you spell that?” Or comment, “That’s a beautiful and unusual name. Do you know its origin?” Or “What does it mean?”
V: Visualize the person’s name. Create a funny or unique or crazy image in your mind. For example, if a person’s name is Mark, imagine you putting a checkmark on his forehead. If his name is Michael, think of him grabbing a “microphone” and jumping up on a table to sing karaoke. For Alexis, picture a woman driving a Lexus. The wilder the image, the better it will stick in your brain. People sometimes ask Jim how he remembers so well and he responds, “How can I forget it? You should see the crazy picture I created in my mind!”
E: End every conversation with using their name before you say good-bye. “It was great visiting with you, Bob,” you might say as you mentally visualize him “bobbing” for apples just one more time.
Decide to focus on remembering people’s names for twenty-one days to embed the habit. “I’d even make up names for people when I walked into a store,” says Jim, “just to see if I could remember their ‘made up’ names when I left the store.”
Since reading can help work out your brain, let’s enhance it with speed reading. Jim is an expert on teaching people this skill, so I asked him to share some secrets with you. He says, “Reading faster is a skill that anyone can learn. But to become a speed reader, it means to let go of or ‘unlearn’ what has been a comfortable, familiar, albeit slow habit. And the hard part is that sometimes you have to slow down during relearning before you can speed up.” Jim told me that as a boy he mastered the art of typing with two fingers when he’d stay at his grandparents’ home. “They were wonderful loving people, but they had no toys,” he explained. So he kept himself entertained on their old typewriter, by teaching himself to type like crazy with two fingers.
And then he took a required typing class at school.
The teacher asked him to let go of his two-finger method and use all ten of his fingers instead. What do you think happened to his typing speed at first? Yes, it slowed way down. But eventually, when he mastered the art of ten-finger, or touch, typing, he was able to type faster than ever. “Reading is much the same way,” Jim explains. “Most people are reading with two fingers, so to speak.”
Here are some insights and tips to help quicken your reading speed.
• Though you may think that people who read faster comprehend less, the opposite is true. Here’s why. People who read slowly read One. Word. At. A. Time. They are reading so slowly that they are boring themselves. Their mind begins dashing around the environment looking for something more interesting to hold its attention. They can’t focus on the content of what they are reading. Faster readers actually have better comprehension because they can focus more easily: Basically, the information is hitting their brain at a more interesting speed.
• Another common issue that slows down reading is “subvocalization,” which means that some people say aloud every word they are reading in their head. Using this method, you can only read as fast as you can talk, which is 200–500 words per minute. We think much faster than we talk, so by getting rid of the subvocalization habit, with specialized training, you can begin to read closer to the speed of thought than the speed of talking.
• Regression or rereading slows down reading. This habit is like someone having control of a DVD and rewinding it a little bit about every thirty seconds. Breaking this two-finger habit helps people to read faster.
• Using a finger, a pen, or a computer mouse to follow the words, as if you are invisibly underlining the sentences, will increase your reading speed 25–50 percent across the board. The reason? Your eyes are attracted to motion, and this increases focus. Also, in the way that the senses of taste and smell are linked, so are touch and sight. There is a touch–sight connection in the brain that when activated increases speed and comprehension.
• If you are right-handed, try using your left hand to follow the words as you read. This activates more of your whole brain. Most people are “left brain readers,” and they find when they use this method that it engages their right brain. One of Jim’s clients said that he reread Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea using this method, “only this time around, it was like I could actually feel the sand on my feet and hear the ocean waves. The only thing I didn’t like was the smell of the fish.”
• Take notes as you read. By taking notes as you read, your comprehension will shoot up. If you share or relate what you read, even pretend to “teach it” to someone else, your retention will be even higher.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, author and philosopher Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider to help us visualize two strong forces in the brain. The prefrontal cortex, or PFC, is much like the rider and involves the thinking, logic center that we assume (or like to assume) is in control of our lives. The elephant is what I would call the limbic system and represents our emotions, which are automatic responses to outward triggers based on stored memories. As long as the elephant wants to go where the rider directs him, things work fine. But when the elephant “truly, deeply, madly” wants to go somewhere that the rider prefers him not go, who is going to win that tug of war? Most bets are on the elephant.
How do we integrate, then, our own rider and elephant so that our PFC and limbic brains, our goals and our desires, our thoughts and behaviors, get more in sync? One way to do that is through continual, goal-directed, brain-training techniques. This is one of the reasons we developed the brain-training modules on our website at www.theamensolution.com. I like to call it our 24/7 Brain Gym, because you can log on and work out your brain at any time.
The process starts with a long assessment to help individualize your program. Based on how you score, you’re given a personalized set of exercises to boost your weak areas and strengthen the ones that are already working well. The development of this part of our site flowed out of years of gathering information from thousands of people, using the latest research on how to optimize brain function. This allowed us to create a program that helps the brain operate better as a whole system, ultimately helping your behaviors and your beliefs work together. In other words, it helps the rider and the elephant stop the tug-of-war and work together in cooperation.
Savannah DeVarney, one of our site developers, says, “What we have found is that one brain function precedes the other. Our internal state drives our external state, or how we behave in the world. Every fifth of a second you have an emotion that becomes a feeling, which may turn into a conscious thought and then drive a behavior.” So looking at this process, it may seem as though we are helplessly chained to the elephant of our emotions. A part of this is true, but the rider can influence the elephant’s automatic emotional responses in significant ways over time. Change the way you perceive the world around you, along with changing the automatic feelings and thoughts coming up within you, and you’ll find that what you choose to attend repeatedly and over time will harness and refine the internal elephant.
The default mode of the human brain is more sensitive to negativity. This is part of the built-in survival system of the human race. Being hyperalert to negativity in the environment—say, a noise that sounds like a bear in the forest—was one way to assure survival in earlier, more dangerous times. Now that humans live in a world that is for the most part safer, the brain still has a residual focus on negativity, but it no longer serves us well.
Here’s an example. You have a headache. Let the brain take its natural negative course, and it begins to spiral into worst-case scenarios faster than you can say, “Gee, I must have a tumor.” Within a few seconds your inner elephant can take you down a path that imagines your headache is a baseball-sized cancerous mass, skips straight to visualizing yourself on your deathbed, fast-forwards to imagining your own funeral in living color (complete with songs, hymns, flowers), and gets angry at your spouse when you contemplate him or her marrying someone else you don’t like. At this point your mate may innocently walk in the room, and you find yourself feeling and acting inexplicably ticked off. This downward spiral can take place within seconds. This is how quickly a response to a trigger (a headache) can deteriorate into a negative spiral, instigating bad behavioral outcomes (you are unfairly angry and short with your spouse for an imaginary future scenario).
The good news is that we can also, and just as easily, spiral into positivity.
Everything that comes into our brain, be it from external sound or visual cues or memories that pop into our mind, causes an automatic emotional response. Our brains begin processing things like body language or the tone of someone’s voice, and this leads to emotions that are subconscious reactions. But as these emotions become more conscious they turn into feelings. Butterflies in your stomach would be one example. At this point we can consciously switch what we are attending to and choose to focus on better and more positive thoughts.
An example might be that you are about to speak to a group in public. You realize that your mouth is getting dry and your stomach is flip-flopping. The automatic fear response is in full swing. However, this is when you can choose to “attend to” more positive thoughts and actions. You can begin to breathe slowly and deeply. The brain takes a cue from this and begins to relax. You can think about how much your audience needs and wants the information you have to share, taking the focus off your fear and onto their receptivity instead. Continue like this and before long you will be relaxed and positive, looking forward to stepping up to the podium with energy, focus, and joy.
The rider has tamed the elephant.
Another scenario: Your inner elephant really wants a sugary cookie and would like to go down the path leading to an extreme sugar high. But you’ve also trained your brain to pause and recall the emotions that come after the sugar cookie. The fatigue, the shakes, the excess weight. You remember that after the high comes the crash. You’ve begun to train your brain to want more positive outcomes, so you choose instead to eat half of a frozen banana that has been rolled in chopped nuts, stored ahead in your freezer for such a time as this, going down the path to a truly satisfying and healthy snack. This healthy treat satisfies your urge for something sweet while also giving you fiber and protein and potassium and more. You know you will feel better and won’t have a headache or be hungry again in thirty minutes. You give your body what it really wants and needs, satisfying both elephant and rider.
Now imagine that you practice positivity in every circumstance where you notice your thoughts about to spiral down. You stop them and restart a more positive spiral and change your mood state, and then automatically better behaviors will follow as well. You do this so often that it becomes habitual. Over time you can even change your personality. You can go from a fearful, worst-case-scenario auto-responder to a positive, happier, more relaxed, productive, and enjoyable person. You make better decisions, both in the short term and long term. No matter your age, you can do this.
Besides being aware of what to pay attention to and focus on, there is another way to speed up and help your brain integrate and respond to life in better ways. It only takes ten to fifteen minutes, three times a week, sitting in front of your computer and playing a few fun and relaxing “games” in our 24/7 Brain Gym on the Amen Solution website (www.theamensolution.com).
Think of training the brain to respond in more focused, positive, and calm ways as we think of exercising for our bodies. I like to call it mental workouts. And just as we exercise, eat right, and brush our teeth as a form of preventive health, by training the brain on a regular basis we are practicing preventive mental health. Should a crisis come along, you’ll have trained your brain to deal with stressors and problems more effectively. Better responses to all of life’s challenges will have become habitual, so you are not as easily thrown into an unproductive negative loop.
We are all constantly on a thin edge, which can lead us down one side to negative spiraling or another side that can lead us to more positive and helpful reactions and behaviors. The brain is also extremely suggestible and open to cues and clues. For example, if you are feeling insecure, try standing up tall with shoulders straight and head up, and smile with confidence. Adopting a confident body posture sends a message to your brain that says, “I’m feeling confident that I can tackle this challenge.” Latching onto role models of confidence, listening to audiotapes, being around confident people, and reading quotes that support a more confident state of mind can all affect which side of the “edge” your brain decides to ski down, which in turn affects your behaviors in the real world.
The 24/7 Brain Gym provides exercises that keep your brain tuned up and your automatic habitual responses to life’s many triggers more positive, hopeful, and calm. It covers these four areas:
• Boosting your memory and attention
• Enhancing your emotional IQ
• Increasing your happiness
• Reducing your stress
In addition, the site offers:
• Emotional training games to help you to better pick up on nonverbal clues
• Thinking training games to help boost your attention, memory, and planning skills
• Feeling training games to help minimize stress and enhance your heath and well-being
• Self-regulation training games to help you manage your emotions, thinking, and feeling
Together these four areas help keep your brain in top shape, so both the elephant and rider parts work in tandem and allow you to handle life better. This is especially important when it comes to longevity. Those who visualize themselves as getting better as they grow older, who look forward to their golden years, and who respond to life’s adversities with resiliency and positivity indeed live longer and happier lives. One of the testimonials from a client who used the Brain Gym training was that when her father passed away, she felt she was better able to cope with the grief and changes than she would have been before she’d toned up her brain. She felt it helped her to be more effective with difficult decisions and comforting others who were also grieving, and she was more resilient post-loss.
The games in the Amen Solution Brain Gym are amazing—and fun. Even in the first week I could see my abilities improving. What an innovative way to increase intelligence, emotional IQ, and internal self regulation!
—BILL HARRIS, CREATOR OF HOLOSYNC
Consider adding mental workouts to the rest of your longevity habits, and it will pay you back many times with increased feelings of calm, happiness, and focus. You’ll also be proud of the life legacy you leave others as your outward behaviors more and more line up with your inner convictions.
No matter your age, income, IQ, or education, there are dozens of ways to help your neurons grow, stretch, and branch into a younger, more beautiful brain every single day. Here are a few examples:
1. Learn a new language. Learning a new language requires that you analyze new sounds, which improves not only auditory-processing skills but also memory.
2. Play Sudoku. Sudoku is a numbers (not math) game that is both popular and addictively fun to many who play it. It can help increase your logic and reasoning skills as well as your memory. Crossword puzzles do the same.
3. Lose the list. Using mnemonics (triggers to aid memory using visual imagery or sounds, such as rhyming) is a great way to boost your brain while developing a system to remember things. There are several great memory courses available on audio or video recordings, often at local libraries or online.
4. Get in the game. Play board games like chess or Scrabble. Trivia games can boost memory, jigsaw puzzles can help visual and spatial skills, and mah-jongg can help executive function (the capacity to control and apply your mental skills).
5. Online brain-training games such as our Brain Gym at www.theamensolution.com can be quite helpful in keeping your brain fit. Spend about ten minutes a day doing these fun games, and see if you don’t find your brain beginning to process better and faster.
6. Be a Curious George. Stay curious about life and learning. Read and study or take courses in subjects or the arts or activities that capture your fancy. Be a lifelong learner and you’re more likely to stay young at heart and in your brain.
7. It is never too late to go back to college! “People with fewer academic qualifications may grow old faster,” according to a DNA study that compared groups of people who spent different lengths of time in education and found the ones who spent the least time had shorter telomeres, or “caps,” on the ends of their DNA, a sign of premature aging in cells. Think you’re “too old” to earn a degree? Ask yourself, “How old will I be in four years if I don’t earn a degree?” The oldest person to graduate college in the United States was in her midnineties! Already have a degree? How about getting another one? Or go for a variety of continuing education courses, designing your own degree in “What I’ve Always Wanted to Learn.”
8. Learn to play a musical instrument or a different instrument than you normally play.
9. Try a brain healthy sport you’ve never tried.
10. Try a new brain healthy recipe, perhaps from one of my wife’s cookbooks.
11. Break your routine. This is especially important for anyone who is tethered to bad, brain-harming habits. You can increase your chances of staying healthier longer if you change your daily habits and routines. Introducing new habits can help rewire your brain so you don’t fall back into the same patterns of activity. For example, if you always take the same route home to work so you can stop at your favorite doughnut shop along the way, take a different route to work and bring a homemade brain healthy smoothie made from protein powder and fruit, which you can sip along the way.
Here are some workouts I recommend to help balance six different areas of your brain.
• PFC (forethought)
• Strategy games, such as chess and checkers
• Meditation to boost PFC function
• Hypnosis, which can help focus and boost PFC function
• Crossword puzzles and word games
• Memory games
• Deep relaxation and/or meditation
• Hand-warming techniques. As you warm your hands it sends an automatic signal to the rest of your body to relax.
• Diaphragmatic breathing
• Deep limbic (emotions)
• Killing the automatic negative thoughts. There is more information in chapter 7.
• Gratitude practice
• Building libraries of positive experiences to enhance mood states
• Juggling
• Interior design
• Dancing
• Table tennis (also works prefrontal cortex)
• Martial arts, without risk for brain injury (also works PFC and temporal lobes)
• Handwriting
• Calligraphy
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? By keeping your brain young, curious, and ever learning new things in this fascinating world of ours, you may find yourself growing younger, rather than older, as the years go by.
1. To find your motivation to learn something new, begin by asking yourself, “What gifts do I have to bring to the world that could be lying dormant between my ears?” Then ask, “What do I dream of doing with my life?” Go ahead, start writing your bucket list now. Your brain loves activities that hold promise and excitement like this one.
2. Think of books as a college course between two covers. Books are the world’s greatest educational bargains. You can learn from the world’s greatest minds, past and present (and for little cost), if you become a reader. You can become an expert at almost anything, at any age!
3. Turn your car into a “university on wheels.” Purchase, download, or borrow audiobooks on a variety of subjects that pique your interest. Download podcasts from great teachers whom you admire. You’ll turn boring drive times into classrooms of fascinating knowledge.
4. Stop telling yourself you have a poor memory or that you are not a good reader. Instead say, “Memory is an art I can practice. I can read as well as anyone by applying new habits.”
5. “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” Formal learning is important for many, but only those who go above and beyond the educational system discover the true joy of lifelong learning.
6. When memorizing a list, associate it with the craziest picture you can think of to help your brain recall it later. No one sees the image you are holding in the privacy of your mind, so be creative and have fun with it.
7. To remember someone’s name, repeat the name, use it once or twice in natural conversation, visualize the name as a picture (perhaps on the person’s forehead), and use their name when saying good-bye.
8. Try increasing your reading speed by using the simple method of following sentences with your finger, a pencil, or your mouse cursor.
9. Set aside three or four ten-minute sessions a week to play a variety of brain games on your computer. It’s like circuit training for your mind. We offer many great exercises for your brain in the form of fun games in our 24/7 Brain Gym at www.theamensolution.com.
10. Sharpen your brain by enjoying leisure activities that also keep you thinking. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that reading, playing board games, playing musical instruments, and dancing were among the best leisure activities for keeping your brain young.
11. Try breaking your routine by doing something different and outside the box. Try a new sport. Whip up a new recipe. Take a new route home. Mix up your life. Variety is not only the spice of life, but it will help grow new neurons in your brain too!
12. When you really want to learn something well, make sure to teach it to someone else. This will dramatically increase your skill and knowledge in a subject within a short period of time.
13. Note-taking increases comprehension and retention. When you read, take notes in the margin of a book. If you’re reading a book that you cannot mark up, keep a notepad handy as you read. Jot notes on the strips of paper, then tuck them in the pages where you found the quote or point you liked.
14. Lifelong learning involves becoming more curious about all of life. For example, to keep your mind from wandering in conversations, be a curious listener. Notice not just what another person is saying but also her body language and tone. Ask follow-up questions. Pretend you are a journalist or a therapist, deeply intrigued with the story you’re being told and the stories behind the story.
15. Don’t ask yourself, “How smart am I?” Instead, ask yourself, “How am I smart?” There are many kinds of intelligences: social, mathematics, logic, art, creativity, intuitive sensing. What do you excel at?
16. Everyone has preferred learning styles. Find your style. Do you learn best by reading, hearing, talking, writing, doing, or some combination of these? Try to learn something new via your best learning style. If you are an auditory learner, listen to a book on tape. If you are a kinesthetic learner, take a class where you’ll have hands-on experiences.
17. Cognitive skills tend to dip after we graduate from college or retire from work. Don’t stop challenging your brain on a daily basis! Be a perpetual student of life. Take continuing education classes or get a college degree. Learn to be a gourmet cook, discover fly fishing, write your memoir, study the brain! The world is endlessly fascinating for those who never stop learning, and it helps your brain thrive.
18. Meditation has been shown to boost activity in the PFC and sharpen your mind. Just a few meditative minutes a day can make a dramatic difference in your mental abilities.
19. Boost your prefrontal cortex by making clear goals and looking at them every day.
20. Boost your brain’s flexibility and creativity centers by asking yourself to look at everyday activities, such as family time or how you do an activity at work, in new and different ways.