How to improve your brain power?

We – the Homo sapiens – the most advanced creatures on this planet (but may be not in the Universe, I guess!) and the organ that makes us the best among the rest of millions of species roaming our planet is nothing but our brain.  The human brain – not the biggest among animals – but may be size does not matter over here.  The biggest brain is that of the elephant and it is a very intelligent animal too but size does not matter when it comes to speed and efficiency.  But first ask yourself one question.  Are you really aware of the gift that you possess?  Have you ever tried to improve your mental capacity to lead a better life or to do something in a better way than you were previously doing?  It is a known fact that we humans hardly use 1% of our mental potential and die with over 99% of our brain totally unused.  What a colossal waste of talent!  It might even be possible that had even 1% of the world’s population had tried to improve their mental caliber, then we might have solved many vexed problems that we are facing today like the global warming, food crisis, and energy crisis.  So, I decided to write a series of articles on how to improve our mental efficiencies and lead a better life, this one being the first.  Here I will be explaining the basic concepts regarding brain power.  We will come to the “how” part of it later – this is just to make your initial concepts clear and remove your (mis)concepts if any!

The first thing that you need to do so as to improve your brain capacity is to consciously remember that every second you are using your brain, either consciously or subconsciously. One way to define the improvement in mental prowess is the ability to do work that generally requires conscious mental effort in a spontaneous and subconscious manner.

Here is a simple exercise for you to explain this concept: Sit straight. Raise up your right hand and try to make a cross or plus sign in the air. Now put your right hand down. Raise your left hand and try to make a circle in the air. Put your left hand down. Now try to do both these actions simultaneously. Easy? It sounds easy though but it is a very crucial example that shows how the left and right brain coordinate with each other. Initially while doing this exercise, you will be doing it consciously and slowly. Now if by practice or whatever trick, you somehow manage to do this thing without any conscious effort, you can say that you have mastered one aspect of mental power, i.e. right-left coordination.

For improving your brain power, you must first understand how your brain actually functions and you do not need to be a neurosurgeon to do that. In layman’s terms, the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body and vice-versa and both sides or hemispheres of your brain are connected by a thick band of neurons (brain cells) numbering up to 250 million called the corpus callosum. One more important point to remember is that your left side of the brain deals with day to day skills like language, logic, reasoning, memorization, etc. while the right part deals with more abstract things like art, creative thinking, and other things which generally are not used in day to day activity. Unfortunately, our entire education system concentrates more on developing the left part of the brain rather than the entire brain itself. To harness your full potential, you need to develop both parts as well as the coordination between those two.

The second point to remember is that, scientifically speaking, when we talk about brain power improvement, what we are actually talking about is the “connectivity” part of our brain. Consider a hypothetical data center with trillions of servers. Each server is a huge storeroom of information. Now consider if we connect any two servers together. What we are doing is the exchange of this vast bundle of information from one server to another. Now consider it on a bit macro scale – what if we can connect each server with all other servers – what you create will be something of the sort of a powerful internet system or a grid. Now my friends, to be humble, what you are carrying in your skull is something that is thousands of times faster and efficient that the hypothetical concoction that I have described above. So, the take home point is, your brain power improves when each of your neuron is interconnected properly with all other neurons and can receive and send information from/to them.

Today, our fast paced lives are so busy that we cannot give time to ourselves and our health. But we should not forget that the time invested in increasing your mental efficiency is worth it because you will be getting back that time compounded when you will be doing more work in less time and manage your life efficiently. So, on this note, I end my first article on this series. My subsequent articles will deal with the “how” part of increasing your brain power.

Till then, a small exercise to stimulate your neurons. We are so much used to with seeing and doing things, that we sometimes ignore to develop our other senses which is a crucial part of our overall mental development. Hence, in a day, at least for 10 minutes, try to do some work blindfolded. This is one of the ways to stimulate your brain to use your other sense organs, i.e. hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Remember, the more you use, the better you become. Good luck!

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