Eight ways to sharpen your mind and tune up your brain

The verdict on games, crosswords and other ‘brain-boosting’ exercises. The brain is like a dense conglomerate of muscles, each one dedicated to a particular task. Exercise any one of them and it will get stronger, but you need to exercise them all to improve your general cognitive ability. If you practise adding up figures all day, for instance, you will get very good at adding up figures, but if you never resort to estimation – a skill performed by an entirely different brain ‘muscle’ from arithmetic – you will be no better than anyone else at judging, say, the size of a crowd. Brain-training has been dogged by the difficulty of developing exercises that improve functioning across the brain rather than in one small part. It’s now recognised that suites of exercises – those that package together visual search exercises with motor coordination challenges and word-retrieval games, for instance – can have broad benefits. However, if you have a healthy brain capable of a normal range of skills, the best exercise you can get is real life. Taking an active part in the community, enjoying art, listening to music, engaging politically and enjoying a rich social life – these are the best training of all. © Scott Balmer Not all of us, however, have optimally healthy brains. Nor is it always possible to develop or practise the full range of cognitive skills. Brains degenerate physically with age, just like every other part of the body, and many people can’t live life to the full because they’re locked into repetitive work or cut off for some reason from intellectual stimulation. When people get older, their neurons tend to be less excited by environmental stimuli. This is partly due to reduced hormones and neurotransmitters, but partly because fewer events are novel […]

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