The Master Muscle of Your Body is Your Brain
In its normal state a healthy human brain is constantly active. It's constantly busy monitoring, adjusting and repairing the body in order to make it function with optimum efficiency. Out of all that activity arises the mind which is also perpetually busy and active in associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data in order to keep you alive and well in a competitive and challenging society.
One of the reasons it's so difficult for many people to focus and concentrate for long periods is this constant mental activity.
People can get extremely frustrated when their attention is constantly being interrupted by stray thoughts and emotions, but it's perfectly normal, and there are ways to remedy that.
If you don't know it by now the brain works and behaves much like a muscle. So to train it you exercise it like you would a regular muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
It may seem strange to think of the brain as a muscle, especially when its main purpose is to store memories and enable thinking. But when you start exercising it rigorously you'll discover just that. You'll be able to do more with your mind than you ever thought possible, just as you would be physically stronger after regular physical exercise.
Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don't use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive skills as it is for muscles.
Brain cells, like muscles, need exercise in the form of education or other stimulating experiences to stay healthy. Researchers have found that the brain's great capacity to physically change and become more powerful with experience - once thought to be limited to childhood - remains throughout life.
Mental exercise, scientists are finding, causes physical changes in the brain, strengthening connections between brain cells called synapses and actually building new connections. Such physical changes can occur within seconds, as when we shift attention, or they may take hours or days, as some memories are cast into the biological ingots that last a lifetime.
You can develop specific abilities just by practicing certain exercises that affect the areas of your brain where these abilities reside. Scientists have already created programs for learning-disabled children by using this technology.
The areas of your brain that you use the most grow stronger over time and get more ingrained, fixed and habitual as the years go by. In effect you become more of the same.
When you really work out your mind, new dendrites grow and form new pathways for information and energy to flow through. Dendrites are thin branch like structures that convey information between brain cells. To make your left-brain more powerful you need to work hard on solving logical problems, math and language. By working hard on abstract, spatial or emotional problems your right brain becomes more powerful. To develop your frontal lobes, the master muscle of your brain, your exercises should focus on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks.
You go to the gym and use the equipment there to exercise and train specific muscles. The same applies to your brain. You use specific "mental weights" to exercise certain areas of the brain, and the mental muscles you want to make more powerful.
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