Brain Training

Let’s talk about brain training.

We’ve discussed that your brain has something called neurons.

These little cells right here.

It’s a cell that connects to other neurons or other cells in our brain.

These cells are connected to each other by something called synapses.

So every time you learn something new your brain creates more synapses or these connections.

So every time you learn these connections are being created.

That’s the first step.

Next we want to strengthen these connections because over time if we don’t use these synapses these

connections disappear because memory sometimes fade.

Right.

Why you learn one day you might forget another day if you don’t use it.

So you need to strengthen those connections so that these connections last a long time so that these

connections are strong.

That’s why we repeat things when we learn.

Usually the first time we do something we don’t learn.

We have to do it over and over and over and we’re going to get to that later on in the course.

Simply put if you forget something.

It means that those connections aren’t strong enough.

The neuron connection the synapses are gone.

They’re not strong enough.

So our brain is like a muscle at any moment it’s growing or deteriorating your brain is never in just

the same state.

And when you’re not exercising your mind your mind actually atrophies and actually loses neurons.

But when we use our brain when we learn new things neurons become linked together through repeated use.

So you need to practice to create these strong connections.

Practice creates stronger and stronger connections.

And we learn that diffuse mode has a chance to build these strong connections not just the focused mode.

And that’s why where you don’t do late night studying or we make sure that we sleep we train our brain.

We form these new neural connections by exercising it and we exercise it by repeating what we learned

and we start thinking of the brain as a muscle something that you have to train something that either

is being atrophied or something that is growing.

We start to realize that if we don’t use it we’re going to lose it.

Now finally when it comes to brain training there’s actually one other thing that’s super important

and this is actually quite a new recent discovery.

We used to think that when we’re born we have all the neurons at birth that is we don’t create new neurons

in our brain is just neurons connect with different neurons.

And that was it.

And neurons die if we don’t use them.

This new study found that in a few places like the hippocampus which is right around here in our brain

and it’s used for memories new neurons are actually created every day.

And since new neurons are created every day when we’re learning learning new things will keep them around.

How cool is that.

But then there’s one other thing when it comes to brain training that is super important and that is

actual physical exercise because we learned that our brain is a constant state of movement either growing

or declining just like our muscles in our body.

But physical exercise that is going for a run going for a jog lifting weights playing sports actually

help with our brain because it allows us to be in that diffuse mode to think about other things to relax

our brain.

And that actually in turn helps our brain as well.

So amongst just learning Also physical exercise even if you’re not thinking about anything even if you’re

just daydreaming is actually good for the brain.

The key here is that we just need to use our brain.

So now that we know how to train our brain let’s uncover some other topics that can help us with this

brain training.