Low-Tech Brain Exercises

You may not be as geekish as I tend to be.  That doesn’t have to leave you out of the brain fitness opportunities that the discovery of brain plasticity have opened up for all of us — another thing placed in my thick skull by a client.

Brain Farts and Senior Moments

John is a manager in a company that is very high touch, low tech.  I know, hard to believe, but there are some people out there whose work actually doesn’t involve computers and software.  John knows that there are some habits he has that keep him from staying on task, leading others, and managing a client caseload.  He is getting older, has a clean bill of health from his physician and talks about brain farts and senior moments.  John uses a compter to send email, but that’s about it.

He said, “I want to be able to take care of my brain, to settle it down for a little, and to remember where I put my damn keys, but I don’t want to learn to use a computer to do it.”

It’s easy for some of us to forget that everything we can do for ourselves is not eloectronic and projected on a monitor.  It seemed like a good time to look for some tools for brain fitness that were more low tech.

• Exercise,of course.

All exercise is good for the brain.  Some exercise is better, but what is best? Better exercise is almost anything that is aerobic, walking, swimming, biking, things that get the blood pumping.  The top shelf in this categoory are exercises that move you in directions other than your normal modes of movemtn. Yoga, for example, involves movement, stretch, breathing, and attention, all of which directly and positively put the gray matter through new paces.

• Visit somewhere, anywhere different as often as possible.

Categorization may not be the death knell for the brain; it does lull the wrinkly crew up there into common and regid patterns.  A key to remaining a genius is exposure to many things.

• Look at different things.

Your author’s interest in iconoclasts and outlaw heroes comes in handy here.

“The key to seeing like an iconoclast is to look at things you have never seen before. It seems almost obvious that breakthroughs in perception do not come from simply staring at an object and thinking harder about it. Breakthroughs come from a perceptual system that is confronted with something that it doesn’t know how to interpret. Unfamiliarity forces the brain to discard its usual categories of perception and create new ones.” And later, the author explains that “visual creativity – imagination – utilizes the same systems in the brain as vision itself. Imagination comes from the visual system. Iconoclasm goes hand in hand with imagination. Before one can muster the strength to tear down conventional thinking, one must first imagine the possibility that conventional thinking is wrong. But even this is not enough. The iconoclast goes further and imagines alternative possibilities.”  Gregory Berns. Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

• Look at things differently.

Psychological flexibility and brain flexibility require the ability to transcend categorical thinking.  A great brain exercise is to take an issue you feel strongly about and spend time taking the opposite point of view.  As aabove, taking an opposite point of view forces the brain out of categories and forces it to take pathways that otherwise my lie dormant.

“The real voyage of discovery is not seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

• Take up a new hobby

Hobbies like wood working, drawing or painting, knitting all make you use your brain in new ways.  Measuring, designing, moving your hands, planning and creating all become part of a hobby.  Do one that you have always wanted to do and hang in there,

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.  At least at first.

• Do word or number games

Games can be crossword puzzles, word search, sudoko.   Stretching games like these are like yoga for neurotransmitters.  Words especially (this is my opinion) help bring back context, and there is always the ones you can’t figure out and you have to ask someone else.

• Write Things Down

My sweetheart, my partner in crime and other matters is always after me to write things down, to make lists.  I resist heartily.  Even so, I know she is right.  Writing makes a difference, whether it be lists or simple writing practice.  I was just reading a blog post over at CopyBlogger about learning to write good copy, something I am trying to learn currently.  Dave Navarro has a great suggestion there.  Literally copy good writing.  As is said there, not to plagiarize, but to practice.  There is something about the movement of the hands in forming words that just makes your brain stretch.

• Connect with others.

To paraphrase Alan Watts, we are not just brains in a skin sack.  There is an argument being bantered about the wab lately that we are not our brains, or is it that our brains are not us.  Either way, I can see a sensiblie argument in this.  The other unspoken truth there is that without our brains, there is no us.  I would argue that without other people, there is no brain.  Could this be the attraction of Twitter and other social networks?

Of all the hard things to bear, to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude is maybe the hardest. - “The Chronicle of Young Satan”

Brain Fitness for Free

So, a few ideas for brain fitness and health that you can do with little money and no computer.  The hard part.  No ya gotta do ‘em!

Oh, yeah, one more -

• Learn Your Computer!

Mike

Photo by dbking