Experts have long believed, and recent studies have confirmed, that keeping your brain healthy with brain training activities is one of the most reliable ways to maintain your state of mind.[1][2][3] Brain training activities help to preserve old connections, keep your mind working well, and support the formation of new neural connections.
Brain training activities are also a good way to notice if something is going on from a brain health point of view. If your daily puzzle suddenly becomes challenging, you will know to get checked out. From there, you can work with your physician to formulate a supplement and medication routine that can slow, or even stop the damage.
And most of these exercises are also lots of fun and engaging. The past couple of years have marked a considerable advancement in the development of these brain disorder tools with more and more manufacturers discovering inventive with ways to train your brain.
We recommend trying out multiple programs and change these programs as you become bored. Many of these tools are designed to help you keep interested for a long time, and be highly adaptive to individual needs.
If you can’t get any of these programs or apps, there is still one “ancient” way of keeping your brain in great shape: read, read, and read some more. Your local library has thousands of books, and they are all free. Just stop in and pick up a few books and read a bit every day. This helps keep your brain active.
How To Exercise Your Brain
Exercising your brain is crucial but doing the right types of brain enhancements is just as important.[4][5] There isn’t a brain gym to go to, so you need to be proactive in finding the right brain disorder tools. First, you need to understand where your problems are. If retaining numbers is an issue (like remembering phone numbers of birthdays), then you should try focus on number exercises to overcome that problem. It uses more of your brain and keeps you sharper.
Then, you need to work on memory and building strong connections. Memory brain exercises are one of the best tools, and there are hundreds of apps and programs out there. BrainReference’s team is working hard to cover all of them!
Your level of mental fitness is more defined by how well you do these brain exercises. These aren’t just some mind exercises you can do once and be done. They need to be done every day to keep you sharp and healthy.
3 Disorder Tools For Brain Optimization
From harnessing the power of light and sound to influencing brainwave patterns, or even just playing simple games, these powerful brain disorder tools offer you important cognitive benefits as a direct result of scientific advances in the understanding of the human brain.
1) Neurofeedback
Many people describe this method of brain training as “a meditation on steroids.” The goal of neurofeedback is to strengthen specific desirable brainwave patterns and to train your brain to function more efficiently through better self-regulation.[6][7]
The process is pretty straightforward. First, an examination is conducted using a brain scan and a brain mapping system (QEEG or qualified electroencephalography). This initial examination is required to show whether your brain is functioning optimally.
Then the patient goes through extensive training that teaches his brain how to increase specific brain waves while decreasing others. The whole purpose of this training is to obtain more desirable brainwave patterns. The training can also give the patient far more control over how his brain works.
Dr. Andrew Hill of the Peak Brain Institute in Los Angeles developed a particular training protocol,[8] a “spaceship game” if you like, an utterly non-voluntary process that shapes the brain by giving it feedback only when it’s doing certain things. This training protocol allows people to fly spaceships on a screen using just their mind.
During the game, patients will receive continuous feedback, or to be more accurate; their brain will receive this feedback based on a reward system. When the brain goes into undesirable wavelength patterns, it is punished by the game.
For instance, the music behind the spaceship will fade away, or the spacecraft will stop flying, or the smoke coming out of the back of the spaceship will decrease if you stray into stressful beta brain waves patterns. That is a sign to your brain that it actually needs to go into alpha brainwave production and stop those beta brainwaves.
From inexpensive home training neurofeedback units to professional training programs overseen by your team of neuroscientists, neurofeedback can be used to manage things like obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, ADHD, or anxiety. Or to just optimize your thinking patterns.
2) Light Therapy
Photobiomodulation (more commonly known as Light Therapy)[9] has a wide range of applications for brain training. Light Therapy will not only improve your body’s natural circadian rhythm, but it can also produce large amounts of nitric oxide in neural tissue, shut down inflammation in the brain, enhance memory function and cognition with near-infrared light stimulation, and boost oxygenation.
Light Therapy was the sort of treatment you could only find in an expensive clinical setting or a hospital. However, the “technique” has become a lot more affordable and accessible to a lot more patients via a headset device called the VieLight Neuro.
VieLight Neuro’s technology makes use of transcranial-intranasal light therapy with a headset and a little probe that goes into the nostril. VieLight Neuro device will then start emitting infrared light at a frequency that encourages the nitric oxide generation and activates more of the cellular activity in your neural tissue with light stimulation of blood capillaries in the nasal cavity.
Besides its powerful effects on the brain, the nitric oxide can also cross[10] the blood-brain barrier (BBB) to the rest of your body. Due to these benefits, this type of device is excellent for those who need help falling asleep at night. Light Therapy is also effective during the day if you want to help out with brain inflammation, before workouts, or to improve focus.
There are even some really intriguing and interesting studies going on right now regarding reversal or control of things like Alzheimer’s and dementia using light and frequencies to fix these kinds of disorders.
3) Brain Training Games
Brain exercises and brain aerobics like crossword puzzles or Sudoku help age-proof the brain and keep it working at optimal capacity.[11] To qualify as good brain activity, an exercise must offer a challenge, variety, and novelty. From a brain training point of view, it doesn’t matter if you use structured apps (like Fit Brains which is full of brain games to try or the Brainscape app which allows you to create your personalized flashcards and learning activities) or just a pen and a piece of paper.
Another popular brain training game is “Dual N-Back Training,” a free program that has received a lot of attention lately. “Dual N-Back Training” involves increasingly difficult levels of short-term memory recall of certain letters and numbers.
Two studies[12][13] conducted in 2012, one by a German company and another by the University of Switzerland showed that a few weeks with “Dual N-Back Training” could increase the ability to compartmentalize activities, to practice mental discipline mentally, executive function, the ability to concentrate intently on one thing while completely ignoring something else, and to direct attention with specificity or to apply all creative energy towards a task until its completion.