Simple tips to stimulate your brain
The central and most important part of our body that shapes our activities and the life is nothing but the brain. A person without a brain or having a non-functional brain is as good as a dead body. Hence, it is essential that our brain needs equal, if not more, amount of care as do the other parts of the body. We do a number of exercises to keep up our body fit, trim and healthy. We engage in physical exercises, running, jogging, weightlifting and what not, to keep your muscles and bones toned up.
Often there is a misconception between the brain and the mind. For some people, both the mind and the brain seem to the same and used synonymously as well. However, there is a subtle difference between the two, and a clear understanding of this difference is essential for the understanding of the brain and the need for exercising it regularly.
I am sure everybody is aware of the computer, and it is through the means of computer that you are reading this article. When you think of a computer, two things immediately come to the mind – one is the hardware – the nitty-gritty things of motherboard, wires, connections, and all such things that go into the central processing unit of the computer. The other one is the software, which helps you to use the computer in a way that suits your requirement and meets your needs. Hardware without any software is not useful and similarly software without any hardware cannot be of any use.
Now coming back to the difference between the brain and the mind, think of hardware as the brain and the software as the mind, and you will appreciate the difference as well as the importance and significance of the two things.
The brain is a physical part available to every one of us. It has been found that every person at the time of birth has about one billion neurons or brain cells, and this is all you will have until the end of your life. There is no accretion to your brain cells during the stages of your growth. The brain cells, also called as neurons, develop connections through pathways and utility of these pathways will keep the brain fit. At the age of six, a child would have developed as many as 1000 trillion connections using those 100 billion neurons or brain cells. From the age of 14, these connections start fading out if not activated and utilized properly.
Now, it is left to the person to utilize these brain cells effectively. It is also true that not more than 5% to 10% of these brain cells have ever been used by any person up to now including the super-intelligent people or great scientists like Albert Einstein or philosophers like Plato or Socrates.
This is all about the brain and its importance. This brain needs to trained and exercised as we do with other parts of the body, to keep it fit and healthy.
There are a number of ways to keep the brain fit and healthy with a daily dose of exercise. Some of the exercises suggested for brain exercises include:
reading
writing
number crunching
solving crosswords
solving Sudoku puzzles, and / or
involving the brain in some sort of thinking activity.
All these are useful exercises to the brain. Can all these or most of them can be combined and done in a single action or a single exercise?
Yes – you can do that in one single action. Try out a game of chess either with a partner or with the computer playing chess online.
The game of chess is the ancient one, said to have been first played in the 6th century, and is still very popular among the people. Now, with the advent of Internet, the game has been taken to the masses and anybody having a little knowledge about the game and the passion can play online chess and enhance his skill set. He can also exercise his brain which will help him to be fit and strong mentally even at his old age, and cannot fear of contracting diseases such as Alzheimer disease or multiple sclerosis in his later years.