A continued spirit of learning throughout one’s life produces a strong and healthy brain. Learning and challenging yourself is imperative to the improvement of your brain fitness. Not only does studying, training and learning make you more confident and wise, it also keeps your brain healthy.
The act of learning exercises different areas of your brain. Depending on what new skill you are trying to learn, you may be training your memory, movement or association techniques. Different parts of your brain can be connected to certain aspects of the learning process. Your frontal lobe is associated with your reasoning, planning and problem solving skills. It is also directly related to our movement and emotions. The parietal lobe is also associated with movement among other things like orientation, recognition and perception of stimuli. Visual processing is associated with the occipital lobe. And finally, your perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory and speech are linked to the temporal lobe.
Find something you’re interested in and then learn how to do it.
Do you know you could learn a new skill by spending some time in the bookstore.
Learning can come at different levels of difficulties. You don’t necessarily need to go back to school and get another degree in order to be learning. There are simpler (and less expensive) ways for you to train yourself in a new skill.
First, think of something that you may already be interested in. Think of something that you can do on your spare time. Something that won’t cost you lots of money. You could learn how to paint, play the piano or to cook. You can challenge yourself to write a book, a short story or a poem.
Use resources online or at the bookstore to help teach you a new skill. There are endless amount of books and articles that present a step-by-step process to learning a new skill. One website that comes to mind is eHow.com. On this website, you can find articles on how to create origami art, how to install a car amplifier or how to pick a lock with your paper clip. You can learn how to do just about anything if you just do a little homework. Find something you’re interested in and then learn how to do it. Or find something you’re curious about, and figure out how to create it.
Whatever you choose, try to spend about 30 minutes learning this new skill. Setting aside time each day to train your brain is better than spending hours upon hours training your brain once a week. It’s about practice, and you need to practice on a daily basis. You probably won’t be good at the new skill right away. So you need to train your brain slowly but at a steady pace.
Once you’ve learned this new skill, become a master at it and continue to stay-up-to date on this skill. For example, if your goal was to learn how to change a car battery, then go online and learn more about car batteries in general. See what people are saying about the different car battery brands. Stay current with the new developments on car batteries.
Your brain is working a mile a minute when you are learning. It is attempting to dissect the instructions you are sending it to learn the new skill while also learning new motions, programming new memories and training to remember what it’s learned. Learning is an excellent way to work out your brain.
Photo by craigfinlay
