Keeping Your Brain Healthy: Brain-FX

Workouts for Your Brain May Tone Memory

Just as physical exercise pumps up your muscles and energizes your metabolism, mental exercise can improve your concentration, memory and other mental faculties.

This is especially important for a large population of Baby Boomers who are hitting their older years and beginning to notice declines in mental acuity.

Read this article in Wired online magazine from Aug. 4, 2005.

When's the Last Time You Went to the Brain Gym?

Yes, there is an official Brain Gym website, complete with trademarked programs, a course and a book. Check out www.braingym.org for information.

These interesting people claim they are a "worldwide network dedicated to enhancing living and learning through the science of movement. For more than 30 years and in over 80 countries, we have been helping children, adults, and seniors to...

• Learn ANYTHING faster and more easily...
• Perform better at sports...
• Be more focused and organized...
• Start and finish projects with ease...
• Overcome learning challenges...
• Reach new levels of excellence..."

I am curious to find out more of how they go about doing all this. Interesting concept for sure.

12 Things to Do To Work Out Your Brain

Dave Pollard writes an article Twelve Ways to Think Differently.

The Idea: Twelve methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and make you more creative and better able to understand the world.

The 12 methods that he points out are:

1. Meditation
2. Reconnect With Your Senses
3. Reconnect With Your Intuition
4. Analogies and Metaphors
5. Conversations and Interviews
6. Synthesis, Distillation and Restatement
7. Reading (and Writing) Fiction
8. Psychoactive and Other Drugs (not recommended for health reasons)
9. Learning a New Language
10. Learning Something Outside Your Comfort Zone
11. Do Impulsive and Serendipitous Things
12. Collaboration

It's worth the read, over on his How to Save the World blog. Please be advised that these 12 points are his own ideas, not recommended, especially point #8! All others seem like very good ideas to exercise your brain and to create new neural connections.

Leadership Effectiveness & Exercise

They are starting to prove what we've suspected all along: busy executives are more effective if they take the time to exercise.

A study by the Center for Creative Leadership has measured leadership effectiveness in two groups: those that regularly exercised and those that didn't.

You can read the newsletter article here.

Obviously, top leaders in organizations have little time for taking an hour out of their schedules for workouts. But they are now showing that several bouts of just 10 minute workouts during the day improves functioning.

Since mental clarity, energy and focus are so important to the people running organizations, it makes sense that they build into their daily routines some physical activity. Sometimes they can multi-task their workout, by using treadmill or bicycles for reading, or just reflecting on what really matters.

Here's a great quote I recently found on this very subject, several millenia ago...

"Every now and then go away, even briefly, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to loose power.” Leonardo da Vinci

Of course, he was talking about relaxation, but exercise is a form of that, at least in my mind.

Right or Left Brained?

I've never bought into the myth that someone is either right or left-brained. This idea that we are either one or the other is very popular; there are even books and assessment tools that claim to help right-brained people survive and conquer in our left-brain dominated world.

I react based on what I've learned through science: our brains are wired to operate on both sides, and we use both sides continually. The right and left hemispheres are connected by the Corpus Collosum.

That band of neural tissues may be larger or smaller in some individuals, but barring an accident or abnormality, we all use both sides. Women apparently have larger Corpus Collosum than men. Does that mean they can operate both sides better? I haven't seen this evidence.

People confuse right and left brain tendencies with personality traits. In other words, some people prefer to use logic and reason to process information; others prefer to use intuition and emotions. That is a question of preference or style of thinking. A preference doesn't preclude using a different way of thinking in some situations. Jung was the psychologist who studied how we process information. Later, these preferences were researched by Myers and Briggs.

Last night we had a 'brainstorming' session with a group of authors. One of the participants was very analytical in his way of processing information. He needed to see a system, with steps to follow. Some people would call him left-brained. But that is merely a metaphor. I think we create a disservice when we categorize humans as either/or, left or right-brained.

Earlier in the day, I had a phone call from a woman who was all over the map. She wanted to get some consulting time on a couple of business projects. But it was difficult for her to focus long enough to clearly express what she needed. What she wanted to do was paint a broad picture, touching on all the elements of her confusion, dispersing emotional energy as she talked. I can only imagine that this must be a process that works for her.

But as I am a logically-oriented thinker, it was uncomfortable for me to listen to her. As a busy professional, I wanted to set some boundaries and help her to focus and get to the point.

Call me left-brained, if you want. Focus is essential to any person, and that's what I wanted to give to her.

I'd like to see more integrated approaches when we refer to someone and when we use categories like right/left, and logical/emotional. It may seem to make sense, but the whole right/left brain categorization is actually false, and really should only be used as a metaphor.