Increase Your Mind Power – Neurobics

The following months I will write a series of posts on increasing your mind power. It has been a long-time interest of me and recently I got into the subject again after reading some great books by Steve Gillman, 100 Ways to Increase Your Mind Power and A Book of Secrets.

Neurobics?
The first in the series is on Neurobics. The term Neurobics was invented by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin. It is fully explained in their book Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercise Although this books seems to be written for age 40+, I think anyone of any age can benefit from this information. If not for the promised benefits (prevent memory loss and increase mental fitness) than pure for the fun of it, especially when you do some of the exercises with friends or family members.

With Neurobics you use your five physical senses and your emotional sense in unexpected ways to that encourage you to break out of your everyday routines. The aim of Neurobics and the specific exercises is to provide you with a balanced, comfortable, and enjoyable way to stimulate your brain. The exercises are designed to help the brain manufacture its own nutrients that strengthen, preserve and grow brain cells. An active brain is a healthy brain, while inaction leads to reduced brain fitness.

Neurobic exercises
For an exercise to be Neurobic it should do one or more of the following:

1. Involve one or more of your senses in a new context. Don’t use the sense you normally use, but rely on other senses to do an ordinary task.  Here a few examples:
   • Get dressed for work or take a shower with your eyes closed.
   • Walk around your living room with the lights off.
   • Identify food on your plate only by smell, taste, and touch.
   • You can also combine two or more senses in unexpected ways, for example, listen to a specific piece of music while smelling a particular aroma.
2. Use your full attention. To do this an activity has to stand out from the background of everyday events and make your brain go into alert mode. This type of activity has to be unusual, fun, surprising, engage your emotions, or have meaning for you. Examples:
   • Turn the family pictures on your work desk upside down.
   • Take your family members to your office for the day.
3. Break your routine in a significant way. This is quite similar to what I described in 21 Ways to Expand Your Comfort Zone. Examples:
   • Take a completely different route to work.
   • Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, get dressed, etc.
   • Prepare a breakfast or dinner from another country. And if you eat Chinese or Japanese food, eat with chopsticks of course.

Social interactions
Activities involving social interactions are usually good Neurobic exercises. Social situations are generally unpredictable so they are more likely to result in non-routine activities. Most people have a strong, built-in need for these interactions, and in their absence, mental performance declines. Our modern way of living has reduced the number and intensity of our ordinary, day-to-day social interactions. You can shop for new stuff without ever leaving the house, you can get cash money without seeing a bank teller and you can buy fuel for your car by swiping a card at a gas pump, instead of talking to an attendant. Several studies have demonstrated that social interactions have positive effects on overall brain health, so find opportunities to interact with others. Being out in the real world, where you’re using all your senses, including the important emotional and social “senses”, is essential to a healthy brain and an active memory.

Try it yourself
These exercises can be done anywhere, anytime. Based on the criteria mentioned in this post, think of the exercises you can do when you are for example getting ready in the morning, going to work, shopping, having dinner, on vacation, etcetera.

Share your ideas for exercises in the comments.

Have fun with these exercises!

Gerber

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