Posts Tagged ‘brain training’
Why would you want to rewire your brain? Because the evidence suggests that doing things that cause basic changes in what you know or can do may be the most effective things you can do to increase your brain fitness.
One of the biggest challenges this time of year is keeping your brain fitness program going in spite of shopping, parties, family, and work. All of the usual temptations are there, plus a new group of reasons not to stick with your program.
When I look back at the number of visitors to this site, I can see a big spike in visitors around the time I wrote a post on free brain training software. It appears that a lot of people are looking around the Internet for free opportunities to keep their brains sharp.
Although there has been a lot of interest in some corners about the benefits of dual (or even triple) n-back training, much of the research on brain training shows that training across several cognitive domains may be the best way to maintain your brain fitness.
Studies across sites and with different techniques are consistent in showing that multi-domain training is probably the best way to go. That means, first, doing training activities that require both verbal (words) and visual skills. That would mean not only doing something like crossword puzzles (a verbal skill) but also working on doing mazes or a computer-based visual game.
Although the research on cognitive training doesn’t really provide too much guidance, it’s my opinion that it may be a good idea to train on a variety of activities. Why? Given the likelihood that what may stimulate the brain to grow new connections is change, it’s probably important to do something new regularly. Just doing the same activity over and over again may not be the best way to keep your brain fit.
Jean Piaget was a researcher who lived early in the 20th century and had a big impact on developmental psychology. He studied his own children and developed a theory of how mental abilities develop that has been extremely influential.
One of Piaget’s key ideas is that we organize information in mental structures called schemas. You might have a scheme for how a car works. You know about how gasoline is used and how the air intake and electrical systems work. Then maybe one day you learn about a problem with how the air filter works on your car. It would be new information, but you would easily be able to incorporate it into your overall schema of how a car works. When it’s easy to put information into an existing schema, Piaget called the process assimilation.
But something else could happen. What if in the next few years we all have electric cars? All your information about air filters and gas pumps would no longer be relevant. You would have to develop a new schema, or modify the existing car schema to have a new major category for electrical cars. When the new information means that you have modify an existing schema, Piaget called the process accommodation.
What does this have to do with brain fitness? If you look at the kind of activities that seem to be the best for increasing brain fitness, it looks as though they are activities that require accommodation rather than assimilation. It may be helpful to spend your time learning new vocabulary words (assimilating new information to the language you already know), but it may be better to spend time learning a new language (accommodating your existing schemas to include new ways of expressing meaning).
So my suggestion is that what’s best for brain training will be activities that are really new to you and make you change your habitual ways of thinking about or seeing world.
Latest
- Meditation as Brain Training
- Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monk
- Brain Fitness Tip: Training Without a Computer
Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. (more…)
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.