How Your Brain Is The Master Muscle Of Your Body

In its normal state a healthy human brain is constantly active. It's constantly busy monitoring, adjusting and repairing the body in order to make it function with optimum efficiency. Out of all that activity arises the mind which is also perpetually busy and active in associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data in order to keep you alive and well in a competitive and challenging society.

This insistent mental chatter is one of the main reasons it's so hard to improve mental 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.

Scientists have discovered that the physical structure of the brain changes in response to mental exercise. Brain cells change or strengthen their connections and even form new ones. Some physical changes may occur within seconds or they may take hours or days.

Research indicates that certain exercises can build up specific brain areas, and some scientists are setting up programs to use this new knowledge to help learning-disabled children.

The areas of your brain that you use the most grow stronger over time and get more ingrained, fixed and habitual as the years go by. In effect you become more of the same.

When you use your mind rigorously, the brain grows new dendrites. These are the thin branch-like structures that stimulate and carry information between brain cells. If you work hard on solving logical problems, language and math, you grow dendrites in your left-brain and it gets more connected and becomes more powerful. If you work on solving abstract problems, spatial and emotional you develop your right brain and it grows to become more powerful. If you work hard on solving future related problems, multitasking, planning ahead, prospective memory, meta-cognitive tasks you develop your frontal lobes.

To exercise your body you go to the gym where you have specially made equipment to exercise and train specific muscles. The same goes for your brain. To exercise your brain you use "mental weights" to exercise and train the specific mental muscles you want to develop and make stronger.