Exercising The Body Improves Mental Ability

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In exercising the body, we stimulate the brain's abilities and capacities. People who are sedentary by their habits or nature are less likely to be as receptive to mental challenges than their vigorously exercising counterparts. Put simply, if you exercise your body, expansion and improvement of your cognition, creativity, neural plasticity, memory and other brain/mind functions becomes easier, and can be achieved significantly more efficiently.

While physical exercise is no substitute for brain training, the latter becomes much easier if the former is made part of the whole mind-body fitness regimen. This has to do with a combination of several factors:

1) Increased brain oxygenation;
2) Improved neurotransmitter activity and chemical balance in the brain;
3) Easier ability to focus on intellectual tasks when body is in a relaxing or relaxed state after physical labor;
4) Heightened consciousness following exercise;
5) Brainwave (entrainment status) activity post-exercise is significantly improved and better-geared toward learning.

There may be numerous other factors involved, but it still makes a great deal of sense to workout regularly if you want to maintain, strain and strengthen your brain. Exercise is positively correlated with reduction in the likelihood of occurrence of senile dementia, and with slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's.

The best time to work on building your mind is after you have engaged your body in vigorous physical exercise for a period of 30 to 60 minutes. You'll retain more of what you study and develop more associative and metaphorical/creative ability. Your mission? Exercise and experiment! ... and enjoy the informative poignant video which is embedded below.

Douglas E. Castle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxkBqFbbAP0

















BRAINTENANCE: Train, Strain And Improve Your Brain. Expand Your Mind.

http://braintenance.blogspot.com

Braintenance contains articles, resources, exercises, games and specially-designed protocols to improve the power of your brain and your mind in every significant aspect, including memory, cognition, IQ, plasticity, creativity and problem-solving ability.

Key Terms: brain, mind, cognitive enhancement, memory, brain gym exercises, IQ, plasticity, mind expansion, creativity, meditation, altered states, perception, self-hypnosis, self-growth, neuron, artificial intelligence, learning, somatic intellect, mathematics, language, dissonance, individualism, herd mentality, puns and word games, linguistics, genius, emotion, subconscious, unconscious, intuition, instinct, psychedelic, reality, learning curve, probability, collective consciousness

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Best Exercise To Increase Optimism - Automatically, Rapidly, Re-Program Your Brainwave Activity

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CLICK ON THE PIC FOR HIGHER REZ

Best Exercise To Increase Optimism - You Will Easily, Automatically, Rapidly, Re-Program Your Brainwave Activity.

Friends and followers of The Braintenance Blog are familiar with the various notions of the subconscious, the ubermind, de-personalization, meditation, neuroplasticity, entrainment, cross-hemispheric intelligence, the electromagnetic and chemical properties of the brain and thought, intersynaptic neurotransmitters and their effects, pheromones, nature, nurture, changing synaptic chemistry, nootropic protocols and a host of other technical details and interesting theories relating to brain, mind, learning and feeling.

What I want to do today, and during the course of these next several weeks, is to pass on to you the gift of increased optimism, based upon a three-step approach developed at McGill University.


What you will need to do is:

Take the optimism test

This will give you an indication of how you compare to other people in your general level of optimism or pessimism. Then, if you want to continue you can:

Test your cognitive bias

This task measures bias in attention and it is important to follow the instructions and keep your eyes focused on the centre of the screen as best you can. This test is much shorter than the one we gave Michael and less well controlled, but should give you a reasonable indication of whether you have a tendency to orient towards the positive or towards the negative.

Remember to take a note of your optimism and cognitive bias test results so that you can compare with your scores at the end of your positivity training.

Finally, you can undergo attentional re-training or a CBM* that is designed to enhance a positive bias in attention – we can call this “positivity training”. The task we used was developed by Dr Mark Baldwin at McGill University in Canada (http://www.mcgill.ca/social-intelligence/) and Dr Stephane Dandeneau (http://www.mcgill.ca/social-intelligence/people/alumni). They kindly gave us access to their attentional training game as well as permission to give you the opportunity to try it for yourself here.

Attentional Training Game

[Please Note: The Attentional Training Game will not work on devices without Adobe Flash. Users with mobile devices may wish to install the MindHabits Psych Me Up! app as an alternative.]


The idea is to do this task at least 3 times a week over a 6 to 8 week period. You also need to do mindfulness meditation for around 10 minutes per day, 3 days a week, over the same period.

At the end of the 7 to 8 week period, you can take the optimism test again as well as take the attention bias test to see whether there has been any change. The mere fact of change, at least anecdotally indicates (with all other things being held equal) that this simple exercise set has changed the electromagnetic 'firing patterns' in your mind.The cause and effect possibilities notwithstanding, it would seem that by changing the manner in which your mind processes or analyzes things (i.e., the "mechanics of mind"), you can change the emotional aspect of your mind... i.e., your feelings about yourself and about life.

Try this, please. You'll truly enjoy it. At worst, you'll feel a slight improvement, but in the more common scenario, you'll feel significantly better. And optimism is a match that tends to ignite the magic of any positive self-fulfilling prophesy.

As the success coaches who are always touting the Laws Of Attraction and Affinity, "If you are optimistic, better things will just naturally come to you." To a large extent, I believe them -- and that belief, in and of itself, more favorably inclines my mind toward optimism.

NOTE: Cyclically and recursively, this expectation of better results and subsequent obtaining of better results, serves to exponentialize the ultimate beneficial effect.

_______________
*More About CBM:
 
Another newer technique is called cognitive bias modification, or CBM (see link here: http://www.economist.com/node/18276234). The idea of CBM is to directly tackle negative cognitive biases by means of a simple computerized programme. By presenting two images side by side very rapidly, for instance, and asking people to respond to small targets that appear in either location, we can subtly re-train the brain to shift attention away from nasty images and towards more pleasant images. A growing body of research shows that shifting negative biases is surprisingly easy and has effects on how well people cope in a stressful situation. This is still a very new technique, however, and we still need to learn a lot more about how CBM effects the pathways in the brain and whether the benefits can last for the long term.



Thank you all for reading me, for experimenting and exploring along with me, and for sharing my articles with your contacts, connections and colleagues (alliteration!) through your social media sharing tools.

Think!

Douglas E. Castle  

Sponsored By: 
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Enhance Creativity With Novelty And Challenge

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Note: We are currently in contractual negotiations with the bluebird to get him to be the spokesbird for THE BRAINTENANCE BLOG -- "The Bluebird Of Braintenance."

Two of the greatest variables which enhance creativity (which happens to be a close cousin of problem-solving) are novelty and challenge.

Novelty is simply doing something which is a departure or disruption from your usual routine, thought patterns or subject matter which consumes a great deal of your time ordinarily. By the way, novelty can be a departure from physical routine as well as psychological or intellectual routines.

Challenge is the exercise of pushing your psychological, intellectual or physical envelope or self-imposed 'comfy cube'

Where novelty forces you to focus on those different skill sets or muscle groups, challenge has to do with applying and exercising them. By analogy, novelty is like exercising a new and formerly neglected muscle group (i.e., exercising your triceps where you've been only exercising your biceps for years), and challenge is actually doing more repetitions, more sets and using increased weights as you integrate this whole new regimen into your routine.

The following twelve somewhat zany but very effective exercises were created by Dorothea Brande, and were mentioned by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project:


1. Spend an hour each day without saying anything except in answer to direct questions, in the midst of the usual group, without creating the impression that you’re sulking or ill. Be as ordinary as possible. But do not volunteer remarks or try to draw out information.

2. Think for 30 minutes a day about one subject exclusively. Start with five minutes.

3. Write a letter without using the words I, me, mine, my.

4. Talk for 15 minutes a day without using I, me, my, mine.

5. Write a letter in a “successful” or placid tone. No misstatements, no lying. Look for aspects or activities that can be honestly reported that way.

6. Pause on the threshold of any crowded room and size it up.

7. Keep a new acquaintance talking about himself or herself without allowing him to become conscious of it. Turn back any courteous reciprocal questions in a way that your auditor doesn’t feel rebuffed.

8. Talk exclusively about yourself and your interests without complaining, boasting, or boring your companions.

9. Cut “I mean” or “As a matter of fact” or any other verbal mannerism out of your conversation.

10. Plan two hours of a day and stick to the plan.

11. Set yourself twelve tasks at random: e.g., go twenty miles from home using ordinary conveyance; go 12 hours without food; go eat a meal in the most unlikely place you can find; say nothing all day except in answer to questions; stay up all night and work.

12. From time to time, give yourself a day when you answer “yes” to any reasonable request.

These are actually tremendous novelties paired with potentially enormous challenges for most of us. I would suggest that you review the whole list before embarking upon any of its proposals. How often have you ever actually done any one of them? How often has anybody whom you may know done of any of them -- or at least to the extent that you noticed?

When you've finished evaluating the list and thinking "Come On... Does that snooty Douglas E. Castle really expect me to do these things?" My answer is "Yes. Do every single one. Also, don't call me snooty."

p.s. If you enjoy Braintenance, please follow us on Twitter at @Braintenance. For a whole selection of other Twitter feeds regarding an amazingly diverse list of topics, you'll find a whole bunch truly worth keeping up with at The Twitterlinks Hubspot Blog.

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