Keep Fit Program For The Brain

merryprankster writes "New Scientist is running a feature on 11 steps to a better brain. While becoming a nun might be an extreme way to avoid senility, there are lots of other tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells." From the article: "First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work. But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention."

Comments

Don't forget about Vitamin N!

[TeleoMan]

Studies show nicotine improves synaptic response and can reduce susceptibility to alzheimer's. It improves creativity, as well.

Put on a nicotine patch before your next final and reap the rewards!

devotion increases congnition

[johnrpenner]

trying to get smart without thinking is like to trying to
get into shape without exercising. the brain is a muscle,
and if you don't use it, you lose it. the more effort
you make to think, the stronger your cognitive ability will be.

here's another take on cognition...

--| Devotion Increases Cognition |---

In an epoch of criticism, ideals are lowered; other feelings take the place of veneration, respect, adoration, and wonder. Our own age thrusts these feelings further and further into the background, so that they can only be conveyed to man through his every-day life in a very small degree. Whoever seeks higher knowledge must create it for himself... Whoever, therefore, wishes to become a student of higher knowledge must assiduously cultivate this inner life of devotion. Everywhere in his environment and his experiences he must seek motives of admiration and homage. If I meet a man and blame him for his shortcomings, I rob myself of power to attain higher knowledge; but if I try to enter lovingly into his merits, I gather such power...

It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings like reverence and respect have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself -- one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread, its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul. Veneration, homage, devotion are like nutriment making it healthy and strong, especially strong for the activity of cognition. Disrespect, antipathy, underestimation of what deserves recognition, all exert a paralyzing and withering effect on this faculty of cognition.

(How to Know Higher Worlds)