How You Can Make Your Brain Smarter Every Day

The following article recently appeared on Forbes.com. If you’re old enough, you may remember a time, maybe back in your childhood, when someone measured your intelligence and assigned a number to it. I suspect that you have been either proud of that “IQ,” or perhaps a little bit chagrined about it, from that day to this. The general belief back then was that intelligence was a genetic endowment, along with eye color or a propensity for baldness. We now know this is simply not true. Your brain — every brain — is a work in progress. It is “plastic.” From the day we’re born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it. If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle — and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body. Most older brains, by the way, are neglected. They are therefore slower and less accurate, and do a poorer job recording useful information and controlling their owners’ actions. The common belief, not so many years ago, was that we older folk were just stuck with these declining faculties. Again, we now know this is simply not true. Your brain can be better, stronger, smarter and safer, starting now. How We Do It, Every Day The key is to get “brain exercise” in the right form. We know that we can sustain or e...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neurologists Authors: Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Fitness Program Brain Plasticity Brain Science BrainHQ Neuroscience Posit Science Soft-Wired Source Type: blogs