You know you can flex your muscles to make a difference in your body’s fitness, but did you know that you can exercise your mental muscles and gain a better memory and more brain power?

When you flex your mental muscles the brain creates neuro pathways to the brain. Some exercises and activities can effectively work the brain in five main cognitive area functions. If you can perform these exercises on a daily basis you can train your mind to become fit and active and your memory recall will increase.

The brain contains the following areas of cognitive recognition:

Language

This part of our brains is devoted to remembering, understanding and being able to identify words. You can challenge this area of your brain by practicing new languages, increasing your grammatical skills and increasing your vocabulary. Continue reading →

You may know about how stress can affect your body – making it difficult to sleep so you’re groggy during the day, depression, anxiety and inability to focus on work and other tasks. Your memory can also be highly affected by chronic or extreme stress.

The memory works by processing information we acquire through the pathways of the brain. We can retain and recall experiences and things we’ve learned in the past through the neural pathways.

Short-term memory (working memory) is what we notice or think of first when we’re reading or memorizing something. Then, it’s processed into the long-term memory – if conditions are healthy in your brain. Here are the three stages that information goes through before it’s processed into the long-term memory:

1 – Encoding

Encoding happens when you listen or observe something. You must move on to the next two stages for it to stay in your memory. Continue reading →