Tags feeling better  mental exercise  kawashima  train your brain  USA  ca  San Francisco  94107  Feeling better: mental exercise 

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By Tim Lundeen  Beginning Noozer
Published: 11 September 2007 08:24 am

- Your brain needs exercise to stay in shape.

Dr Ryuta Kawashima is a professor of neuroscience and has done extensive fMRI (functional magentic resonance imaging) of people's brains while they perform different tasks. His conclusion is that there are two exercises that stimulate blood flow through the whole brain, and will improve/maintain brain function over time.

Both are very simple.

One exercise is to read out loud for 5 minutes a day. This exercises the path from the eyes through word recognition to speech generation to hearing, and lights up the whole brain in an fMRI study.

The other is to do simple arithmetic problems under time pressure, problems such as 8x3 or 11-2. Working on these problems exercises the path from eyes through number/symbol recognition, memory and logic, and the circuits that produce writing and drive the hand to write the answer. With time pressure, this also lights up most of the brain.

His book, Train Your Brain, has 60 sets of 100 simple math problems. When I started, they took me about 110 seconds (just over 1 second per problem). After practice and getting up the learning curve, I got this down to about 80 seconds per set. After increasing my omega-3's (DHA specifically), and going down the learning curve with a higher level of omega-3's, I'm down now in the 65-70 second range.

For these math sets, I xerox the problems so I can just keep working my way through the sets and don't have to buy a new book every 2 months. Having a xerox is also nice because they are flat on my desk, so I don't have to cope with the funny angles you would have writing in the book.

I've also added 5 minutes per day of reading out loud to my regimen, I find it pretty enjoyable actually.

Since I've made a lot of changes in parallel, it is hard to say which of them are the primary contributors to how much better I feel. Subjectively these seem to have helped, and since my program works I just keep doing them. It is also interesting to see how my performance changes as a result of sleep, diet, etc, and they serve as an ongoing check to make sure I'm not slipping. So for the 7-8 minutes a day these two things take, they seem quite worthwhile.

Age considerations: these exercises should work for anyone who can multiply, so from age 10 on.