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Your Brain Is The Master Muscle of Your Body

By: Gardar Gardarsson PNLP

The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution and is a compact miracle of about 1,000 billion nerve cells forming a network that some scientists believe to be the most complex system to be found anywhere in the universe. The human brain is continually adapting and rewiring itself and is the source of the conscious, cognitive mind. It is constantly learning by trail and error, inducing conclusions from past experience and creating new methods to deal with the situations it comes across.

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.

If you don't know it by now the brain works and behaves much like a muscle. So to train it you exercise it like you would a regular muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

Even though your brain looks like a mass of grey jelly and is very soft it behaves and reacts just like a muscle with rigorous mental workouts. You'll feel it as soon as you start exercising it regularly. Your brain will feel more powerful and you'll be able to do things with your mind that you can only dream of now.

Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama states that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children acquire new skills by rehearsing again and again until they can do it automatically. We need to practice regularly, or else we lose them. "Use it, or lose it" is as true for cognitive mental skills as it is for muscles.

Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to remodel its structure and function in response to outside stimuli. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change the brain's anatomy. Brain plasticity is at its peak with infants, when brains are most capable of adjustment but researchers have found that the brains capacity to change remains throughout 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.

You can develop specific abilities just by practicing certain exercises that affect the areas of your brain where these abilities reside. Scientists have already created programs for learning-disabled children by using this technology.

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.

In order to keep your memory sharp, it has been thought that you have to grow new dendrites. Decades ago, it was discovered that we can grow new dendrites, the microscopic tentacles that reach out from each neuron to make connections with other neurons. If you repeat something you have learned, your neural pathways will become more and more efficient in that part of the brain. Work hard on solving logical problems, math and language to power up your left-brain. Work on abstract, spatial or emotional problems to make your right brain more powerful. And last but not least work on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks to develop your brains master muscle, the frontal lobes.

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.philvault.com

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