10 Ways to Keep your Mind Sharp

If you don’t want your brain to lose its prowess as you age, better follow these tips.

Do something

Scientists are starting to think that regular aerobic exercise may be the single most important thing you can do for the long-term health of your brain. For mental fitness, aim for at least 30 minutes of physical activity every other day, reports Live Science

Eat, eat, eat

A low glycemic diet-high fiber, with moderate amounts of fat and protein-is broken down more slowly in the body than high glycemic foods, such as sweets and white starches. steady pace of digestion in the gut gives a more reliable flow of energy to the brain, likely optimizing the organ’s long-term health and performance.

Scientists Can Predict Your Gaming Skills By Scanning Your Head

Do you suck at StarCraft II? Do the intricate combo moves of Street Fighter escape you? Maybe you need an MRI. Researchers have found a method for scanning the brain that could predict how well you play video games.

Some of us are just better gamers than other. Mind you I’m not putting myself in that group. I spend rounds of Halo shouting obscenities at the screen. I’m talking about folks like my nephew, who runs around killing his opponents with a sniper rifle, never once stopping to line up his shot. The little jerk.

Maybe he’s not simply a better player. Maybe his basal ganglia is just better developed than mine.

The basal ganglia (also known as the cerebral nuclei) is a group of structures – located in the middle of your brain associated with learning new motor skills (joystick wiggling) as well as performing tasks that require quick strategizing and rapid attention shifts.

12 Very Common And Very Wrong Myths About The Human Brain

Much is said about the human brain but unfortunately a lot of what we believe is in fact false.  The following are 12 of the most common myths about the human brain that are simply not true.

1 The 10% myth

This has got to be number one on the list as it is arguably the most common myth regarding the human brain and the most widely spread. We hear constantly that we are only using 10% of our brains and that what the rest of the brain does is anyone’s guess. This is simply not true. The story probably began as a result of researchers discovering that only 10% of neurons are firing in the brain at any point in time, something quite different indeed. There are about 100 billion neurons in a human brain and each one of these neurons communicates with up to 10,000 other neurons in the brain. Obviously this in no way implies that the brain is only using part of its power. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that too many of us are operating at only 10% of what we might be otherwise be capable of if only we bothered to try.

Top 5 Unsolved Brain Mysteries

Introduction­

When you compare the brain’s detectives, neuroscientists, to other detectives, the neuroscientists seem to fall short in solving mysteries. After all, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple needed only about 250 pages each to get to the bottom of their cases. Ditto for Nancy Drew. On television, Jessica Fletcher and Kojak were all able to find their answers in an hour or less, while Veronica Mars needed only about the length of a television season. Even the pride of South Florida, Encyclopedia Brown, was able to solve his cases with little more than a casebook, his trusty sneakers and a wide variety of miscellaneous factoids. If Encyclopedia Brown only required 25 cents per day (plus expenses) to solve his cases, then what’s taking neuroscientists so long to unravel the mysteries of the brain?

Read This Story, Get Way Smarter

Reading this story will make you significantly smarter. We’re not joking — it’s a matter of science.

A study just released by a UCLA neuroscientist found people who surf the Internet at least once a day have better cognitive functioning than those who log on once a month or less. And not just slightly better, either — we’re talking twice the amount. The reason? Internet use actually stimulates the brain’s decision-making and complex reasoning areas, the scientist believes.

“Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” the report, set to be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, explains.

The study looked specifically at adults between the ages of 55 and 78. The participants all had similar education levels, differing only in their amounts of Internet usage. And though some of the non-Net users may have been regular bibliophiles, the research indicated that offline reading didn’t stimulate the same parts of the brain.

“Our most striking finding was that Internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading — but only in those with prior Internet experience,” the scientist suggested.

So, congratulations: By reading this story, you’ve just given yourself some much-needed neurological stimulation. Keep it up, and before you know it, you just might be a genius.