Your brain learns and grows by interacting with your environment. Brain exercises can improve brain functioning and protect you from age-related cognitive decline. Most age-related loss of memory or motor-skill deterioration results from low brain activity, but your brain can actually keep learning and rewiring itself no matter your age. Exercising your brain stimulates brain-cell growth and expands neural networks among multiple brain cells.
Neuromuscular Maintenance
Maintaining the neuromuscular communication elements of your brain helps prevent loss of motor control. Perform skill-based physical activities regularly for neuromuscular maintenance. Your brain releases neurotransmitters, including acetylcholine, which stimulate muscular contractions by traveling to receptor sites on your muscle fibers. Your motor control diminishes without neuromuscular maintenance exercise, because persistent inactivity reduces the number of neurotransmitter receptor sites on the muscle fibers. Examples of skill-based exercises include fine motor skills for creating artwork, dancing, agility and balance activities.
New Activities and Learning
Challenge your brain by performing unfamiliar activities to strengthen existing neural networks, create new ones and enhance your brain's learning abilities. You can try a dance class, tai chi, yoga or some other new physical exercise activity. Sculpting and ceramics work are potential unfamiliar fine motor exercises that challenge your brain. You can also challenge your brain by performing familiar tasks differently. For example, switch the hand you use to control the computer mouse, brush your teeth or comb your hair.
Travel
Travel to new places to stimulate and strengthen your brain. Neuroscience expert Jonah Lehrer explains that travel helps you focus on the facts at hand by forcing you to pay attention to things that are nearby. Your brain normally spends a lot of time tuning out information in familiar environments, but traveling helps loosen up your brain by bombarding it with new information that requires more processing. Travel might even help you become aware of possibilities or solve problems in ways that never would have occurred to you otherwise.
Neurobics
Neurobics is a system of brain exercises developed by Dr. Lawrence Katz, professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, aimed at strengthening your cognitive abilities by activating underused neural networks. Neurobics exercises emphasize the functions of your five physical senses, plus your emotional sense. An exercise might restrict a sense that you normally use for a particular activity, such as closing your eyes while getting dressed or sharing a meal with someone without speaking any words. Neurobics exercises that combine senses might include listening to music while smelling flowers, looking at or making artwork. Examples of neurobic exercises that break routines include taking a new route to work, shopping at a new store or exercising at a different gym.
Reading and Word Activities
Reading and word activities exercise your brain and enhance your literacy. Written sentences activate the left hemisphere of your brain, which contains all the language-oriented brain centers and processes information in a logical and sequential order. Reading also improves organization in the visual centers of your brain and can improve your response to visual stimuli. Reading also refines your ability to process speech by improving the way your brain organizes incoming speech sounds. Other activities that enhance literacy include crossword puzzles, Scrabble and learning a foreign language.
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