10 brain exercise to improve memory quickly
We bring you a series of brain exercise to improve the memory that will allow you to exercise your brain and increase your mental health. If we properly exercise the brain, anyone can develop his intelligence.
In the past, it was believed that intelligence was only a genetic factor like the color of the eyes. At present, we know that this is not true. Your brain and all the brains have neuronal plasticity or neuroplasticity, which allows the brain to form new neuronal connections from the moment we are born, and improve or decrease depending on how we use it.
10 brain exercise to improve memory
Practice these brain exercise to improve memory for adults and children and improve your mental health:
1. Smell and Action
You can activate your memory by relating an odor to a specific task. For example, to memorize a phone number, use a certain smell each time you dial it. You can use aromatic herbs like mint. To study for an evaluation, you can chew gum or use strong smelling lipstick and use it during the evaluation to better remember what you studied.
Remember that, unlike other senses, the nose reaches the memory directly instead of going through other parts of the brain. That is why it is considered as a tool to memorize of extreme effectiveness.
In general, the more you can reconstruct the context in which the memory was kept, the better you remember. This is known as context-dependent memory. If you take this factor into account, your memorization techniques will be more effective.
Apart from the smell, mentally involves as many senses as possible – relates information with colors, textures, smells and tastes. When you rewrite the information to memorize it, you allow it to be recorded efficiently in your brain.
2. Perform Daily Review
According to the Forbes site, these exercises to exercise memory can be performed over a period of 4 weeks to experience an improvement in short and long term memory.
When you are ready to sleep, review everything you did on the day from the moment you got up. Try to remember with as much detail as possible, visualizing in your mind every step from the beginning to the end. With practice, the way you remember details and events during the day will be better. For a greater degree of difficulty, remember the events from the end to the beginning.
Benefits: improve your memory, your ability to visualize, concentration and power of observation. You will be more at the moment because you will know that you must remember what happens around you at the end of the day, then you will attend more to the details.
3. Create Mind Maps
When you return to your home, after you have visited a new place, try to draw a map of the area you visited. Repeat it every time you visit a new site. These mental exercises that you can involve in your day to day, will allow you to improve your memory and your brain capacity; as well as develop your spatial intelligence.
4. Reduce stress and anxiety
The stress is toxic to memory, chemicals in your body produced during stress directly interfere with the process of transferring information from short – term memory to long – term memory.
As time passes, chronic stress destroys brain cells and negatively affects the hippocampus, the region of the brain involved with the formation of new memories and the extraction of old memories.
Tips to overcome stress:
- Set realistic goals
- Take some breaks from your work during the day
- Express your feelings instead of saving them
- Focus on one task at a time
Meditation reduces your stress and improves your memory: scientific evidence continues to demonstrate the mental benefits of meditation. Studies show how meditation improves different conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, diabetes, and hypertension. The meditation also improves concentration, creativity and learning ability and reasoning.
Brain scans have shown that people who meditate constantly have more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. It is an area of the brain associated with feelings of joy, a factor to consider in overcoming stress. These mental exercises also increase the thickness of the cerebral cortex and encourage more connections between the cells of the brain, all this improves mental health.
5. Use the Touch
Because our brains regularly depend on visual information to distinguish between objects, using touch to identify subtle differences increases the activation of brain areas that process information from the sense of touch, increasing the strength of the brain’s synapses.
Adults who have lost their sense of sight learn to distinguish Braille letters because their brains develop more ways to process the sense of touch.
A quick mental exercise to use the sense of touch: place a cup with coins in your vehicle; When you need them, try to determine the denomination only with touch. Repeat this exercise in your day to day carrying coins with you.
6. Practice Visual and Spatial Memory Exercises
We live in a three-dimensional world in which it is necessary to analyze visual information. To exercise this cognitive function, try walking to a room and choosing 5 objects and their locations. When you leave the room, try to remember the objects and their locations.
Wait two hours and try again. You can also look ahead and observe everything that is in front of you and in your peripheral vision. Challenge yourself to remember everything and write it down to force yourself to use your memory and train your brain to focus on your surroundings. These intelligence exercises develop your visual and spatial memory.
7. Sleep better
There is a big difference between the amount of sleep you can have and the amount you need to function in the best possible way. 95% of adults need between 7.5 and 9 hours of sleep every night. Even reducing a few hours can affect memory, creativity and cognitive skills to solve problems.
Sleeping well is critical for learning and memory. Research has shown that sleep is necessary to form memories, giving the activity related to the increase of memory during the deepest stages of sleep. Sleeping better is an excellent mental exercise for memory, try these tips:
Keep a regular schedule for sleep. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. Try not to break the routine during weekends and holidays.
Avoid all screens for at least one hour before sleeping. The light emitted by televisions, tablets, cell phones and computers activates wakefulness and suppresses hormones such as melatonin that make you feel sleepy.
Reduce caffeine Try to reduce your caffeine intake or avoid it altogether if you suspect that it is affecting your sleep patterns.
8. Use your Non-Dominant Hand
Use your non-dominant hand to perform day-to-day activities such as brushing your teeth. Research has shown that using the opposite side of your brain, as in this exercise, can result in a rapid and substantial expansion of parts of the cerebral cortex responsible for processing information of the hand’s touch, which allows you to increase your mental health.
9. Eat foods to improve memory
Remember to involve them in your diet so that our mental exercises are more effective.
Eat Omega 3 – Research shows how omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial for brain health. Fish like salmon is a major source of omega-3. Consider other sources of omega-3 if you’re not a fan of seafood, such as nuts, liver, spinach, and broccoli. Limit calories and saturated fat – Research shows that diets high in saturated fat increase your risk of dementia and negatively affect your concentration and memory.
Eat more fruits and vegetables – They contain antioxidants, substances that protect your brain cells.
Take green tea, contains polyphenol, powerful antioxidants that protect you from free radicals that can damage brain cells.
Take red wine in moderation, contains resveratrol, a flavonoid that increases blood circulation to the brain and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The dark chocolate also has flavonoids that can improve your mental health.
10. Change your routine
Attention is necessary for most daily tasks. Good attention allows you to stay focused despite the distractions and focus on different activities at the same time. To improve attention, you can change your routine. Change your route to work or rearrange your desktop – both will force your brain to disassociate itself from old habits and pay attention again.
As we get older, our attention time decreases, making us more susceptible to distractions and less efficient when performing multiple tasks. This practice will increase your attention and encourage the development of your thinking skills.
Quick mental tips to improve your memory
Involve as many senses as possible: relate information with colors, textures, smells and tastes. Even if you learn better visually, read aloud what you want to learn. If you can recite it rhythmically, even better.
Relate information with what you already know. It uses mnemonic systems to make memorization easier, an example is the Dominic System. You can also make conceptual maps and mental maps. To memorize more complex information, focus on understanding the most basic ideas. Practice brain exercise to improve memory with your own words.
