Your brain is more flexible than we’ve ever thought of before. It is continuously changing in order to optimize itself, reorganizing itself by transferring cognitive abilities from one lobe to the other, particularly as we age. After a stroke, for instance, your brain can reorganize itself to move functions to undamaged areas.
Things that are very common and mundane today can have powerful effects on our brains(positive and negatives). Here is an example of our brain neuroplasticity, some time ago neuroscientists compared the brain scans of London bus and taxi drivers. They discovered that cabbies sport a measurably larger hippocampus – a key area of the brain involved in spatial memory. That’s because cabbies develop intricate mental maps of London to navigate to their fares’ destinations. Bus drivers, who drive the same route every day, do not. We are all quite familiar with the effects of exercise on muscles. When you work out a muscle, it grows stronger.
In the same fashion, If you stop exercising a muscle, if you stop using your brain it will begin to atrophy it. The brain is not a muscle, but when you exercise it, it grows stronger in its own way. Similarly, when you stop using it, it atrophies in its own way. Basically, challenging your brain makes you smarter. Whatever you do on a regular basis affects the way your brain works. Most of us, like UBER drivers, when traveling from point A to point B we rely on using the “routing app” which blocked our spatial capability. The spatial ability or visuospatial ability is our capacity to understand, reason, and remember the spatial relations among objects or space. Not only do spatial abilities involve understanding the outside world, but they also involve processing outside information and reasoning with it through representation in the mind. The danger with this, relying 100% on the app is that you might rely on the specific tool/app to solve your problems instead of doing the necessary self-exploration that will help you uncover the true source of what’s going on.
For best results with your own brain-neuroplasticity training you can focus on :
- Awareness – When you can be increasingly aware of your own experiences, reactions, and limitation, you will be able to guide your own brain training regimen. While driving start making sense of the route, monuments, buildings, even the type of neighborhoods
- Make it up – You don’t have to join a gym to get exercise and you don’t have to use professional services to exercise your brain. Do things that you think are hard. If you are doing a route constantly, try to do it with your app on mute- force your brain muscles to remember. Therapeutic exercise is about doing the things that are hard.
- Observe Yourself – Don’t go looking for reasons to explain your lack of memory or lack of attention. Sometimes a diagnosis of a certain condition or a learning disability just gives people an excuse to stop trying. Instead, look for patterns. What kinds of behaviors do you exhibit? Having the ability to observe yourself might now look like a poor attention span, but it might have been a coping mechanism for a challenge while you were growing up. Uncover those types of observations and you might find it easier to stop unconsciously maintaining your poor attention span.
Brain training is helpful to many. Use it wisely and like any kind of training, change it up as needed. Just think about your mental capabilities in terms of chest exercise day or lower body days, and ab workouts and you’ve got the right idea.
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