The Master Muscle of Your Body is Your Brain

The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution and is a compact miracle of about 1,000 billion nerve cells forming a network that some scientists believe to be the most complex system to be found anywhere in the universe. The human brain is continually adapting and rewiring itself and is the source of the conscious, cognitive mind. It is constantly learning by trail and error, inducing conclusions from past experience and creating new methods to deal with the situations it comes across.

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

People can get extremely frustrated when their attention is constantly being interrupted by stray thoughts and emotions, but it's perfectly normal, and there are ways to remedy that.

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.

To most people the brain does not feel as if it's a muscle, it's just an organ in the head that stores memories and enables thinking. But I assure you that with proper guidance and training you will soon discover that it behaves very much like a muscle. As you start to exercise it you will start to feel it. You discover that you can do more things with your brain and mind than you ever thought was possible.

Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don't use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive 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.

Exercising your brain and mind causes physical changes in the brain. You can change or strengthen physical connections between synapses or build new ones. Some physical changes in the brain may take just a few seconds or they may take hours or days to develop.

You can develop specific abilities just by practicing certain exercises that affect the areas of your brain where these abilities reside. Scientists have already created programs for learning-disabled children by using this technology.

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.

You go to the gym and use the equipment there to exercise and train specific muscles. The same applies to your brain. You use specific "mental weights" to exercise certain areas of the brain, and the mental muscles you want to make more powerful.

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