Brain book. Mental gymnastics to train your brain E-Book

Charles Phillips

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 154

Beschreibung

Brain book. Mental gymnastics to train your brain

Leseprobe

Charles Phillips

BRAINBOOK

Mental gymnastics to train your

The author or publisher cannot be held responsible for the information (formulas, recipes, techniques, etc.) contained in the text, even though the utmost care has been taken in the writing of this work. In the case of specific - often unique - problems of each particular reader, it is advisable to consult a qualified person to obtain the most complete, accurate and up-to-date information possible. EDITORIAL DE VECCHI, S. A. U.

The right of Charles Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright.

© Editorial De Vecchi, S. A. 2021

© [2021] Confidential Concepts International Ltd., Ireland

Subsidiary company of Confidential Concepts Inc, USA

ISBN: 978-1-63919-041-6

The current Penal Code provides: “Anyone who, for profit and to the detriment of a third party, reproduces, plagiarizes, distributes or publicly communicates, in whole or in part, a literary, artistic or scientific work, or its transformation, interpretation or artistic performance fixed in any medium or communicated by any means, without the authorization of the holders of the corresponding intellectual property rights or their assigns, shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of six months to two years or a fine of six to twenty-four months. The same penalty shall be imposed on anyone who intentionally imports, exports or stores copies of such works or productions or performances without the said authorization. (Article 270)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

UNDERSTANDING YOUR BRAIN

Mixed puzzles

Perception puzzles

Language puzzles

Number puzzles

Emotion puzzles

Memory puzzles

Logic puzzles

Lateral thinking puzzles

Intuition puzzles

BRAIN TRAINING

Left/right-brain exercises

Music exercises

Visualization exercises & puzzles

Language exercises & puzzles

Number exercises & puzzles

Memory exercises & puzzles

BRAIN WORKOUT

THE ANSWERS

Suggested Reading

INTRODUCTION

Remember how we were once told that our mental ability peaks at around age 18–24 and that it would be downhill from then on? We were warned that heading a ball during a game of soccer or drinking too much would accelerate our decline by killing neurons. We were told that if neural networks (webs of connected brain cells) were destroyed, they could never be remade. All this, it turns out, is untrue.

Scientists now know that the brain is a regenerating organ. If we use it, if we keep our brain cells firing and making new connections, then its powers will not dwindle. Even in our mature years, the brain can repair and regenerate itself. Your future is bright.

With this in mind, welcome to the Brain Book, the key to keeping your brain trim and your thinking lively. This little book contains a wealth of scientific facts about the brain, to help you appreciate just how powerful your thinking organ is and what astonishing feats it’s capable of. And it’s also full of specially designed puzzles and exercises that will challenge your brain and give it the training it deserves. Working your way through this book will help you achieve peak mental performance – whatever your age.

Fulfil your potential The typical brain has ten billion brain cells. When you think, when you learn something new, you forge connections within your brain. Each of your neurons connects an average ten thousand times with other brain cells, making a staggering total of one hundred thousand billion connections. Indeed, there are more connections in your brain than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

TACKLING THE PUZZLES

Throughout the book you will find puzzles and exercises designed to get different parts of your brain in gear. The more straightforward puzzles are rated as one bar (see bottom left),but the rating of five bars (see bottom right) is reserved foronly the most difficult of challenges.

As scientists have come to a more accurate understanding of the brain, they have realized that the potential of our thinking organ is truly staggering. The number of connections we are capable of forming is colossal. One estimate, made by Pyotr Anokhin and quoted by expert Tony Buzan, is the number 1 followed by ten million kilometres (six million miles) of 0s. So the potential connections outnumber atoms in the universe. This should give you some idea of your potential.

We are getting younger If you are of mature years, you may be younger than you think! In terms of life expectancy you are younger than your grandfather or mother was at your age. Moreover, armed with the latest knowledge on how your brain works, you have a much better chance than your grandparents had of keeping fully alert in later life. So read through the Brain Book and prepare to marvel at the power of your grey matter.

Neuroscientists and brainpower experts will also tell you that your perceptions – the way you see reality – are among the most important elements of your thinking. If you believe ‘I am getting older and feeling tired, my memory is beginning to fail and my mind is falling apart’, then you’ll probably begin to make these imagined effects real. But if you think, ‘Whatever age I am, my mind can be alert and fully stimulated if I take the trouble to keep it active’, you have already started to protect your brain from decline.

TheBrain Boxpuzzle The wooden puzzle in the box consists of a neat six-sided cube, made from 27 smaller cubes. Unravelling it is easy, but fitting it back together is quite a challenge! The puzzle provides a good visual–spatial workout – helping your ability to think in three dimensions – as well as boosting your overall powers of thought. To solve it, you will need patience and imagination to find fresh perspectives.

THINK YOUNG!

Research shows that over-65s can reduce their mental age by 14 years through brain training with problem-solving and puzzles.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR BRAIN

To get the most out of training the brain, we need a little background knowledge. What is thinking? Why do we feel emotions? How does memory work? What are lateral thinking and intuition? This know-how will help us plan a mental gymnastics routine to stretch the brain’s many high-powered capabilities.

A short history of the brain

Our early ancestors did not associate the brain with memory, intelligence and other mental faculties – they thought of the mind rather as a disembodied spirit. The ancient Egyptians, for example, revered the heart as the centre of intelligence and saw the brain largely as an unimportant organ.

In the first millennium BCE the ancient Greeks were the first to link the brain with the mind: in the 6th century BCE Alcmaeon declared that intelligence resided in the brain, while in the 5th century BCE, Plato suggested that the brain recorded impressions from experience, like mouldings pressed in soft wax. But his most famous student, Aristotle, followed the Egyptians in believing that the heart was the organ of thought while the brain’s job was to cool the blood.

Herophilus, a Greek anatomist working in the north African city of Alexandria in the 4th–3rd centuries BCE, identified the brain’s ventricles (spaces in the brain that carry protective and nourishing cerebrospinal fluid) as the locus of our thinking power. This theory was taken up in the 2nd century CE by Galen of Pergamum, then transmitted to Europe by Arab physicians and generally accepted for hundreds of years.

The nervous system Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did researchers begin to understand the brain’s role in the nervous system; some, including the German anatomist Franz Gall, drew maps tracing which part of the brain was linked to which activity. But by the mid-20th century this model had been shown to be too simple – and scientists such as Karl Spencer Lashley were arguing that the whole brain was involved in the more complex processes of the mind.

But much remained hidden. The brain’s awesome power, self-regenerating capacity and almost limitless expandability were secrets waiting to be discovered.

NEW MODEL BRAIN

In evolutionary terms, the brain is a recent invention. Life on Earth dates back 4,500 million years,Homo sapiensare three million years old, but the modern brain evolved only 50,000 years ago.

What is the brain?

The brain is the body’s control centre. Not only does it run complex mental activities, such as learning a foreign language or doing mind-bending puzzles, it also controls your digestion, breathing and other largely subconscious body functions, and commands your deliberate physical actions such as working out at the gym. This prodigiously powerful organ weighs on average 1.5 kg (3 lb) in a man and 1.25 kg (2 lb 12 oz) in a woman – a difference due to the average variation in body size between the sexes.

Most of your mind’s processes are controlled in the cerebral cortex – the wrinkled surface of the brain that looks like a walnut. The cortex, which covers the brain’s largest part, the cerebrum, is ‘cell-heavy’: despite taking up only one-quarter of brain volume, it contains 75 per cent of its cells.

THIRSTY WORKER

Although the average brain accounts for just one-fiftieth of an adult’s body weight, it uses a fifth of the oxygen in the blood.

The brain contains left and right hemispheres. These are cross-wired: the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, while the left half commands the body’s right side. Researchers have also shown that the ‘right brain’ appears to control artistic activities, while the ‘left brain’ commands logic, maths (math [Amer]) and language (see pages*).

Each hemisphere has four areas called ‘lobes’. The frontal lobes control thought and planning. The other lobes – at the side, top and rear – help control the senses and govern language. Scientists also sometimes distinguish between ‘the upper brain’ (the cerebral cortex), which directs mental activities, and the ‘lower brain’ (including the midbrain, cerebellum and brainstem), which primarily control bodily functions, emotions, sexual urges, and instincts such as the ‘fight or flight’ response, which prepares us for action when we perceive danger. The upper brain appeared at a later evolutionary stage and is sometimes called the ‘new brain’.

The latest research indicates that most mental activities involve many different parts of the brain working together.

How brain cells connect

Your brain contains an amazing ten billion cells, called neurons. Each cell has a round centre containing its nucleus, with a cluster of tentacles at one end like the branches of a tree (called ‘dendrites’, from the Greek for ‘tree’) and at the other end a long shoot called an ‘axon’. The axon branches out at the end to make connections with other cells. These connections are actually made across tiny gaps called synapses. A cell sends information in the form of electrical impulses along its axon, generating a chemical transfer across the synapse to another brain cell. The process sparks a reaction in the cells, creating a network of connected cells.

Making new connections The crucial thing to know is that when you learn something new you make new connections between cells, forging new neural pathways. This improves your general mental powers. Researchers have identified more than fifty different chemical messengers (‘neurotransmitters’) involved in the lightning-quick movement of information through circuits of brain cells. When we alter our ‘brain chemistry’ by having a coffee or a couple of glasses of wine we alter the activities of these chemical messengers.

Brainwaves The more you use your upper brain, the more the brain cells are firing, and the more electricity the brain generates. Using electroencephalograph (EEG) machines, researchers have identified four levels of electrical activity, each distinguished by a pattern of brainwaves. When alert and fully engaged, your brain emits beta brainwaves (14 to 40 cycles per second). At rest after activity, you have alpha brainwaves (9 to 14 cycles). Theta brainwaves (5 to 8 cycles) occur when you are ‘on automatic’, while delta brainwaves (1.5 to 4 cycles) occur only in deep, dreamless sleep.

BRAIN CHEMISTRY

Every second, an astounding 100,000 chemical reactions take place in your brain. The electrical impulse sent by a neuron lasts 1/1000th of a second and travels at up to 200 mph.

A history of games

From time immemorial people have enjoyed the challenge of mental tests, puzzles and games. Small clay labyrinths like tiny mazes were popular with the ancient Indus civilization of northern India and Pakistan in around 2600 BCE. At about the same time, the inhabitants of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur played board games similar to Ludo. In ancient Egypt (from the 2nd millennium BCE on) people passed the time with games like backgammon.

The oldest surviving puzzle is the loculus – attributed to Archimedes, the 3rd-century BCE Greek mathematician. Players rearrange fourteen shapes to form a square or other formations. It is extremely difficult, so is also known as the stomachion, the ‘maddening problem’. The ancient Chinese played a related seven-piece puzzle called the tangram.

Over the centuries, human ingenuity and love of games fired the development of a dazzling variety of games and puzzles. Many derived from teaching tools. The jigsaw puzzle, for instance, developed from the ‘dissected maps’ made by 18th-century London engraver/map-maker John Spilsbury. The celebrated Rubik’s cube came from a puzzle developed by Hungarian Ernö Rubik in the 1970s to help architectural students practise three-dimensional visualization (did you know there are forty-three billion billion possible arrangements of the Rubik’s cube?).

Other puzzles were developed just for fun – like the crossword puzzle, developed by an English emigrant to the USA, Arthur Wynne, first published in Fun, on 21 December 1913. The British developed the much more difficult ‘cryptic crossword’. The first, by ‘Torquemada’, was published on 30 July 1925 in the Saturday Westminster.

American pioneer Sam Loyd is remembered as America’s greatest puzzle writer. He began publishing chess problems in the mid-1850s and progressed to mathematical and three-dimensional problems. He invented many types of maths brainteasers, published several compendium-books of puzzles and also worked as a ventriloquist.

Brain training

Human beings derive satisfaction from measuring up to a challenge, and most of us have a playful element somewhere in our characters that takes pleasure in games. Giving ourselves a mental workout is not only enjoyable, it is also beneficial for the brain and for our general health.

Noradrenalin is a chemical in the brain associated with stress. Too much can be damaging, making you anxious and overly alert so that you cannot sleep, and preventing your brain from functioning effectively. But a little stress – the kind provided by a challenging puzzle – is a good thing. Released in moderate amounts, noradrenalin improves the speed and effectiveness of connections between the brain cells.

So your mind functions better when you are slightly stressed. Meeting a challenge also boosts your physical health and general state of mind. The sense of achievement you feel at having mastered a difficult puzzle, say, is associated with the release of beneficial brain chemicals that lift your mood and raise the performance of your immune system.

Use it or lose it As we have seen, the former conventional wisdom – that we are doomed to gradual decline in our brain performance because our inborn supply of brain cells gradually dwindles year by year – is untrue. Doctors now know that the more we forge new connections between our brain cells, the better our mental performance will be. The most effective way to maintain brainpower is to use the brain and to provide it with fresh types of challenge.

Stimulate yourself Research in Chicago indicates that people with a mentally demanding job or a lifestyle that continues to provide them with real brain challenges, perhaps through doing puzzles and crosswords, are around 50 per cent less likely to succumb to Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. Your brain stays young if you keep it active.

Meeting interesting people is another way to keep your brain alert. Scientists have shown that isolated animals have poorer mental functioning than those in a group. This applies particularly to human beings, who evolved as a ‘social’ species.

Ways of thinking

Do you ever think you are so different from your child or parents you may as well be a separate species? Well, children and teenagers do have quite different brains from older people.

Wiring matters For one thing the young are not fully wired – the brain’s frontal lobes, which govern mental control processes, do not fully develop until the early-to-mid 20s. We are also the product of what we have thought. Firing and connecting brain cells, stimulated by experience and knowledge, create patterns of connections that change the brain permanently.

What are the effects of this on how we think? At different life stages we tend to have different ‘thinking styles’. Children up to the age of twelve, for example, like to consider things in terms of concrete reality rather than abstract ideas. They recognize none of an adult’s accepted boundaries and so can be extremely creative. They love to ask ‘Why?’

Teenagers tend to have a highly developed sense of justice and of logic, and a desire to work out all the consequences. Driven by idealism, they do not understand the compromises that many adults have accepted. Like children, they question assumptions. They are fearless explorers of the mind.

The adult brain Adults have a wealth of experience and a brain wired with diverse connections at their disposal. They may have challenging work and a rich and varied life to keep them on their toes. The frontal lobes, now fully developed and functioning, give an enhanced capacity for self-control and foresight – predicting outcomes and adjusting activity accordingly. On the other hand, adults stuck in routine may find their memory failing or their powers of self-expression decaying. This is probably because they are not exercising these faculties. But there is no need for such mental decline.

Adults and pre-adults have plenty to learn from each other. Older thinkers can sometimes benefit from the unfettered, mind-bending approach of the young, while the less mature could sometimes do with adopting the focus and self-discipline shown by their older counterparts.

How to train your brain

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw declared: ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.’ You can choose from a wide variety of games and puzzles to give your brain the regular workout it needs to keep its neurons firing.

Visual and three-dimensional puzzles like printed mazes or the wooden puzzle included with this book help you to forge and reinforce neural pathways connected to visual and spatial awareness. Lateral thinking exercises are a way of developing creative problem-solving, the ‘no boundaries’ thinking of the ‘young-at-mind’. Chess and backgammon boost strategic and counter-intuitive thinking. Attempting anagrams or crosswords or playing Scrabble™ reinforces your vocabulary and encourages you to practise creative thinking.