Enjoy a free brain workout in your own brain gym. The right and left hemispheres of your brain work together, but at different tasks, something like your arms and legs. Exercise your right brain to increase your creative power, imagination and abilities in art, music and poetry. Scientists at the U.S. Air Force Air University design training routines for both hemispheres to break from the traditional emphasis on your mostly logical, calculating and analytical left brain.
Sing
Sing your problems away, suggests Steve Gillman, author of "Problem Solving Power," "Einstein's Mind" and many other books for brain training and self-improvement. Problem solving is normally an analytical task you do with your left brain hemisphere. Sing about your problem, or re-word it in rhymes, and then make tunes and poems out of your solutions to exercise your right brain and add its conscious muscle power to your more computer-like left brain. You will gain problem-solving strength and create new artistic abilities. Do this right brain exercise among your friends and you will also enhance your social and emotional life, which are also right brain specialties. Gillman adds that singing also helps stutterers socially and in the performing arts. Using the creative right side of your brain, the struggling left-sided speech centers can relax. Stutterers usually do not stutter in song.
Smell
Relax and enjoy your favorite music while you surround yourself with a soothing or stimulating aroma, suggests Dr. Lawrence Katz, a neurobiology professor at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Connect different senses in unusual ways through an artistic or creative activity. Exercise your right brain by consciously associating music with the smell of magnolias, or the texture of velvet, or any novel combinations of senses. Dr. Katz has documented growth of new axons and synapses, your brain's thinking circuitry, when you mix new sense impressions with well-established thought patterns. Expand your creative consciousness to grow new circuits in your right brain. The more you have to the think with, the more you can.
Break Routines
Break old habits and create new routines in your daily activities. Physicians at the Mayo Clinic reported in 2007 that changing your patterns can slow and even reverse some signs of brain aging. Your brain will grow new connections to learn and adjust to new ways of doing things. Build some of your new activities around a heightened artistic consciousness or imaginative pursuits and new brain growth will build up your right brain. If you have not done it before, sing in a choir, learn to play the piano or a bagpipe, take an art class, or write a song for your favorite Elvis impersonator. The more you wake your right brain to consciousness, the more your right brain will develop.
Play Games
Play games designed for brain growth. Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a Japanese neuroscientist, has developed a wide range of computer games specifically designed to challenge your brain in areas where your consciousness and brain strength might be weakest. Right brain growth, and improvement in the creative, artistic and imaginative abilities it is so well suited for, has been documented after long-term enjoyment of Kawashima's games. Kawashima notes that it's important to change the games you play once you become accustomed to them. Right brain consciousness only improves when you push yourself beyond your established limits; novelty nurtures your right hemisphere.
