Saturday, August 27, 2005
Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
© 2001 by Richard Restak, MD
Learn as much as possible about how your brain works. Apply your knowledge about the brain to organize ideas. Think of the brain as the creator of incredibly rich montages. Your capacity for new learning increases as you grow older. Learn about your brain’s motor programs. Take advantage of the intimate relationship of learning, memory, and intelligence. Include your memory by using a memory system. Develop your emotional memory. Think in terms of brain geography. Develop linkages associating as many things as you can. Engage in activities that stimulate extensive portions of the brain. Practice forms of mental hygiene. Turn your feeling and emotions to your advantage. Take active measures to reduce stress. Learn to work in concert with your personal bodily rhythms. Strengthen your powers of attention and concentration. Train your powers of logic. Develop the tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Develop your powers of metacognition thinking about your thinking. Increase mental acuity through wide and varied reading. Heighten your sensory capacities. Learn about and experience art and music. Organize a physical exercise program that aims at brain enhancement. Cultivate fine motor control skills involving your hands. Regularly practice some form of mental relaxation. Use technology to augment your brain’s functioning. Concentrate on and act in harmony with your natural abilities. Cognition, alertness, concentration, perceptual speed, learning memory, problems solving, creativity, mental endurance, the more we exercise it the better it performs and the better we feel. An older person reduces risk of developing dementia by remaining mentally active. The Greeks feel that they generated a memory that they transformed it into a goddess - Mnemosyne Mother of the Muses. The map is not preparatory.
Ray Bradbury said “In my early 20s I floundered into a word association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning and walked to my desk and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. It is never too late to enhance the musical appreciation of the brain. Work on jigsaw puzzles, musical instruments, paint, draw, create art, write letters, play cards, play board games, garden, walk for exercise. Head scans reveal that thinking sad versus happy thoughts can change brain chemistry. The brain gets sharper the more it is used. New circuits are forming all the times depending on your level of mental activity or inactivity. Sequencing after you have read you may want to later summarize it for friends. Try to remain alert and aware of events around or pay attention, stay focused, executive control. Future memory refers to your ability to look forward to future goals. Increase your memory and you increase your basic intelligence.
Write down a series of numbers selected at random. Start with strings of five digits and work up to nine digits. Just quickly write down whatever comes to mind. Repeat the strings out loud. When you can repeat nine digits without error, increase the number of digits until you reach your personal outer limit. At this point return to five digits and recite the numbers backwards. You should be able to manage at least nine digits.
Next perform exercises with words instead of numbers. After spelling the word correctly in the forward direction try to spell it backward.
Select four unrelated words and write them down. Say the words for fifteen seconds then put them away. Set alarm for five minutes. When the alarms sounds try to recall the words. With each success increase the number of words in the timeframe until you get about ten words remembered over several hours. Simply register the words without any conscious attempt to form memory tags.
Paired associated learning. Write down a list of twenty words pairs, chosen at random. Study it for five minutes and then cover the first word and see how many of the associated words you can recall. Select a random three letters to the alphabet and then record all words that begin with that letter that begins, in one minute.
Records all animal names you can remember in one minute. The normal performance for anyone under 17 years old is between 17 and 24 animal names. When you finish repeat the test with the change in your strategy. Think about ways of categorizing animals. The brain operates at its best when working within a context someone provided with the structure and meaning.
Memorize the layout of a room, memorized the title of row of books on the nearby shelf. Think of yourself when you were younger. Get on the floor about three feet across from a friend, ask her to close your eyes, and then while gazing into her face ask her to think about the saddest moment in your life. Ask three or four of your friends to bring with them to your house three of their favorite smells. The most important requirement is that the smell must be pleasing to the people’s bringing it. Everyone tells the others what scent he or she likes the best and why. Everyone should describe what memories the scents evoke.
Find a picture of yourself taken when you were half your present age. Start writing a letter from your 14-year-old self to your 28-year-old self. Now flip it, write a letter from your 28-year-old self to your 14-year-old self. The goal of this exercise is to relive the emotions accompanied by the experience. If you are successful you uncovered memories of experience that you haven’t thought about in years. Read and after prepare that the storehouse of techniques for reliving moments from the past.
You will experience difficulty whenever you simultaneously carryout two similar language based activity but you can reduce the difficulty by varying the situation for example when listening to one communication while reading another. Reading or writing can be comfortably combined with listening to music since two different hemispheres are involved. If you are engaged in a task that involves reading or writing take a brain break by switching to something that involves patterns performed.
Crossword dice is seven dice with letters after tossing all seven dice you have once created as many words as you can by arranging the dice. On the left hand page putdown in words or images your ideas about a current topic, a topic of interest. On the right hand page explain your association in words.
Purchase a digital clock with time alarm. Set the alarm for the distance at the time unknown to you. At the instance alarm sounds take careful note of your thoughts and feelings. Try to recall the thoughts immediately preceding the alarm and the thought before that etc. With practice you will be able to track back over dozen or more associations. In doing so you will discover that most conversations are nearly casual, spontaneous, and undirected as they initially seen. Try to identify the theme as they emerged.
Speak in to a tape‑recorder all the thoughts that occurred to you over 15 minutes. Cut down and place two unrelated pictures aside each other and look at it for 10 to 15 seconds. Then write down as many linkages as possible. Practice decreases the need for concentration but it also turns off large portions of the brain.
The brain drives on novelties, try to transform even the most routine tasks into noble and challenging situation. As you toss more often you are dart but your performance falls off why after a few tosses you figuratively begin talking to yourself, you begin put too much thought and enter dialog into the throw as the result you begin to miss. Most important guideline involved not paying too much attention to your feeling.
When depressed we can dwell on the losses and courtesies encountered in our lives. It is a negative thought and attitude that unfavorably alter brain function rather than the other way around. Since the brain can keep only one thought at a time in the foreground of consciousness it is important to emphasize uplifting rather than depressing a negative pre-occupation. Put a happy face on it and smile, smile, smile. If you desire to keep mental efficiency take control of your feelings and emotions. When you are depressed you tend to dwell on unfulfilling or disappointing events from your past. Since you concentrate on the ways that are avoiding a bad outcome rather than bringing about a good one your brain will lock on to the negative.
Concentrate on your ideas and your goals rather than focusing on the bad things than could happen or on how nervous you are feeling.
Calm energy is the mood you would like to experience every moment of our life. Calm tiredness is after a good meal or the rigorous workout you feel tired but calm and relax. Tense energy is that weird feeling that natural high that comes when you are working at peak performance. Tense tiredness is that fully negative mood when you are overextended, overwhelmed, stressed out, and incapable of coping. Aim to eliminate tense tiredness while experiencing calm energy, calm tiredness, and tense energy in their proper sequence.
Even a brief 50 minutes nap can shift you from tense tiredness to either calm tiredness or calm energy. If you want to convert from calm tiredness to calm energy go out for a short walk.
The probability of finding two people who share the same birthday reaches 50% after you get the 23 people. While the human brain filters vast amounts of information, it tends to constantly focus on things and events that appear unusual. What occurs twice in a moment once in every minute and yet never in a million years.
My reading journal consists that each day I make an effort to reflect from literature sciences, read biography or the art mini session. When you finish reading, write the name of the book in pages read on the appropriate days in front of the journal. Then turn and lift the key concepts and ideas you read along with your associated impressions. Books externalize our brains.
What manual skills would I suggest? Anything that involved precise attention would be sustained fine finger control and the possibility for failure such as model airplane or learning to a care your computer or bicycle or jack straw variation of pickup sticks using color-coded sticks.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609604457
© 2001 by Richard Restak, MD
Learn as much as possible about how your brain works. Apply your knowledge about the brain to organize ideas. Think of the brain as the creator of incredibly rich montages. Your capacity for new learning increases as you grow older. Learn about your brain’s motor programs. Take advantage of the intimate relationship of learning, memory, and intelligence. Include your memory by using a memory system. Develop your emotional memory. Think in terms of brain geography. Develop linkages associating as many things as you can. Engage in activities that stimulate extensive portions of the brain. Practice forms of mental hygiene. Turn your feeling and emotions to your advantage. Take active measures to reduce stress. Learn to work in concert with your personal bodily rhythms. Strengthen your powers of attention and concentration. Train your powers of logic. Develop the tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Develop your powers of metacognition thinking about your thinking. Increase mental acuity through wide and varied reading. Heighten your sensory capacities. Learn about and experience art and music. Organize a physical exercise program that aims at brain enhancement. Cultivate fine motor control skills involving your hands. Regularly practice some form of mental relaxation. Use technology to augment your brain’s functioning. Concentrate on and act in harmony with your natural abilities. Cognition, alertness, concentration, perceptual speed, learning memory, problems solving, creativity, mental endurance, the more we exercise it the better it performs and the better we feel. An older person reduces risk of developing dementia by remaining mentally active. The Greeks feel that they generated a memory that they transformed it into a goddess - Mnemosyne Mother of the Muses. The map is not preparatory.
Ray Bradbury said “In my early 20s I floundered into a word association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning and walked to my desk and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. It is never too late to enhance the musical appreciation of the brain. Work on jigsaw puzzles, musical instruments, paint, draw, create art, write letters, play cards, play board games, garden, walk for exercise. Head scans reveal that thinking sad versus happy thoughts can change brain chemistry. The brain gets sharper the more it is used. New circuits are forming all the times depending on your level of mental activity or inactivity. Sequencing after you have read you may want to later summarize it for friends. Try to remain alert and aware of events around or pay attention, stay focused, executive control. Future memory refers to your ability to look forward to future goals. Increase your memory and you increase your basic intelligence.
Write down a series of numbers selected at random. Start with strings of five digits and work up to nine digits. Just quickly write down whatever comes to mind. Repeat the strings out loud. When you can repeat nine digits without error, increase the number of digits until you reach your personal outer limit. At this point return to five digits and recite the numbers backwards. You should be able to manage at least nine digits.
Next perform exercises with words instead of numbers. After spelling the word correctly in the forward direction try to spell it backward.
Select four unrelated words and write them down. Say the words for fifteen seconds then put them away. Set alarm for five minutes. When the alarms sounds try to recall the words. With each success increase the number of words in the timeframe until you get about ten words remembered over several hours. Simply register the words without any conscious attempt to form memory tags.
Paired associated learning. Write down a list of twenty words pairs, chosen at random. Study it for five minutes and then cover the first word and see how many of the associated words you can recall. Select a random three letters to the alphabet and then record all words that begin with that letter that begins, in one minute.
Records all animal names you can remember in one minute. The normal performance for anyone under 17 years old is between 17 and 24 animal names. When you finish repeat the test with the change in your strategy. Think about ways of categorizing animals. The brain operates at its best when working within a context someone provided with the structure and meaning.
Memorize the layout of a room, memorized the title of row of books on the nearby shelf. Think of yourself when you were younger. Get on the floor about three feet across from a friend, ask her to close your eyes, and then while gazing into her face ask her to think about the saddest moment in your life. Ask three or four of your friends to bring with them to your house three of their favorite smells. The most important requirement is that the smell must be pleasing to the people’s bringing it. Everyone tells the others what scent he or she likes the best and why. Everyone should describe what memories the scents evoke.
Find a picture of yourself taken when you were half your present age. Start writing a letter from your 14-year-old self to your 28-year-old self. Now flip it, write a letter from your 28-year-old self to your 14-year-old self. The goal of this exercise is to relive the emotions accompanied by the experience. If you are successful you uncovered memories of experience that you haven’t thought about in years. Read and after prepare that the storehouse of techniques for reliving moments from the past.
You will experience difficulty whenever you simultaneously carryout two similar language based activity but you can reduce the difficulty by varying the situation for example when listening to one communication while reading another. Reading or writing can be comfortably combined with listening to music since two different hemispheres are involved. If you are engaged in a task that involves reading or writing take a brain break by switching to something that involves patterns performed.
Crossword dice is seven dice with letters after tossing all seven dice you have once created as many words as you can by arranging the dice. On the left hand page putdown in words or images your ideas about a current topic, a topic of interest. On the right hand page explain your association in words.
Purchase a digital clock with time alarm. Set the alarm for the distance at the time unknown to you. At the instance alarm sounds take careful note of your thoughts and feelings. Try to recall the thoughts immediately preceding the alarm and the thought before that etc. With practice you will be able to track back over dozen or more associations. In doing so you will discover that most conversations are nearly casual, spontaneous, and undirected as they initially seen. Try to identify the theme as they emerged.
Speak in to a tape‑recorder all the thoughts that occurred to you over 15 minutes. Cut down and place two unrelated pictures aside each other and look at it for 10 to 15 seconds. Then write down as many linkages as possible. Practice decreases the need for concentration but it also turns off large portions of the brain.
The brain drives on novelties, try to transform even the most routine tasks into noble and challenging situation. As you toss more often you are dart but your performance falls off why after a few tosses you figuratively begin talking to yourself, you begin put too much thought and enter dialog into the throw as the result you begin to miss. Most important guideline involved not paying too much attention to your feeling.
When depressed we can dwell on the losses and courtesies encountered in our lives. It is a negative thought and attitude that unfavorably alter brain function rather than the other way around. Since the brain can keep only one thought at a time in the foreground of consciousness it is important to emphasize uplifting rather than depressing a negative pre-occupation. Put a happy face on it and smile, smile, smile. If you desire to keep mental efficiency take control of your feelings and emotions. When you are depressed you tend to dwell on unfulfilling or disappointing events from your past. Since you concentrate on the ways that are avoiding a bad outcome rather than bringing about a good one your brain will lock on to the negative.
Concentrate on your ideas and your goals rather than focusing on the bad things than could happen or on how nervous you are feeling.
Calm energy is the mood you would like to experience every moment of our life. Calm tiredness is after a good meal or the rigorous workout you feel tired but calm and relax. Tense energy is that weird feeling that natural high that comes when you are working at peak performance. Tense tiredness is that fully negative mood when you are overextended, overwhelmed, stressed out, and incapable of coping. Aim to eliminate tense tiredness while experiencing calm energy, calm tiredness, and tense energy in their proper sequence.
Even a brief 50 minutes nap can shift you from tense tiredness to either calm tiredness or calm energy. If you want to convert from calm tiredness to calm energy go out for a short walk.
The probability of finding two people who share the same birthday reaches 50% after you get the 23 people. While the human brain filters vast amounts of information, it tends to constantly focus on things and events that appear unusual. What occurs twice in a moment once in every minute and yet never in a million years.
My reading journal consists that each day I make an effort to reflect from literature sciences, read biography or the art mini session. When you finish reading, write the name of the book in pages read on the appropriate days in front of the journal. Then turn and lift the key concepts and ideas you read along with your associated impressions. Books externalize our brains.
What manual skills would I suggest? Anything that involved precise attention would be sustained fine finger control and the possibility for failure such as model airplane or learning to a care your computer or bicycle or jack straw variation of pickup sticks using color-coded sticks.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609604457
