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How Your Brain is the Master Muscle of Your Body

By: Gardar Gardarsson PNLP

In its normal state a healthy human brain is constantly active. It's constantly busy monitoring, adjusting and repairing the body in order to make it function with optimum efficiency. Out of all that activity arises the mind which is also perpetually busy and active in associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data in order to keep you alive and well in a competitive and challenging society.

This constant mental activity is one of the biggest obstacles to good focus and concentration.

It's hard to focus and concentrate when your thoughts and emotions are constantly interfering with our attention, but the brain and mind are wired this way and it's completely normal.

Researchers have been telling us for years that the brain is a lot like a muscle. It behaves like a regular muscle when you exercise it. Specific mental exercises improve mental performance in specific areas of the brain.

It may seem strange to think of the brain as a muscle, especially when its main purpose is to store memories and enable thinking. But when you start exercising it rigorously you'll discover just that. You'll be able to do more with your mind than you ever thought possible, just as you would be physically stronger after regular physical exercise.

According to Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama the brain and education are almost synonymous. When learning new skills we rehearse again and again until we master it. If we don't practice new skills, they fade a way. The phrase "if you don't use it you lose it" is as true for mental skills as it is for muscles.

Brain plasticity is the brain's natural lifelong capacity for physical and functional change. Basically it is the mechanism that allows the brain to be molded or changed by learning and experience. Research has revealed that this ability to re-generate and re-structure brain cells is active throughout our life.

Exercising your brain and mind causes physical changes in the brain. You can change or strengthen physical connections between synapses or build new ones. Some physical changes in the brain may take just a few seconds or they may take hours or days to develop.

Research indicates that certain exercises can build up specific brain areas, and some scientists are setting up programs to use this new knowledge to help learning-disabled children.

The mental patterns that get the most attention get stronger and more persistent. As you get older they become more ingrained, habitual and fixed, and you become more and more of the same.

When you really work out your mind, new dendrites grow and form new pathways for information and energy to flow through. Dendrites are thin branch like structures that convey information between brain cells. To make your left-brain more powerful you need to work hard on solving logical problems, math and language. By working hard on abstract, spatial or emotional problems your right brain becomes more powerful. To develop your frontal lobes, the master muscle of your brain, your exercises should focus on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks.

The gym provides you with specially made equipment that allows you to train and develop specific muscles. The same thing works for your brain. If you want to develop certain mental abilities or make your brain more powerful you use "mental weights" to exercise specific areas of your brain.

Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com

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