Neurobics
Is a unique new system of brain exercises based on the latest scientific research from leading neurobiology labs around the world -Dept of Neurobiology in the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. The deceptively simple exercise program is the first and only program scientifically based on the brain's ability to produce natural growth factors called neurotrophins that help fight off the effects of mental aging. Neurobic exercises use your five physical senses and your emotional sense in unexpected ways and encourage you to shake up your everyday routines.Neurobics don't require paper and pen or isolating yourself with puzzles. Everyday life is the Neurobic Brain gym. They can be done anywhere, anytime in offbeat, fun and easy ways while you're getting up, commuting, working, eating, shopping or relaxing. They are designed to help the brain manufacture its own nutrients that strengthen, preserve and grow brain cells.
Something as simple as closing your eyes and using your other senses of touch, smell and spatial memory to unlock your door, enter your home at the end of the day and find your way to the coat closet and answering machine is a typical Neurobic exercise. What happens in your brain while you're doing this becomes exercise because different, underused nerve pathways and connections get activated. The result is the production of a kind of natural brain fertilizer that strengthens nerve connections and helps them and your nerve cell receivers (dendrites) stay younger and stronger. And the benefit of that is a fit and flexible mind ready to meet any mental challenge whether it be remembering a name or where your car keys are or mastering a new computer program or staying creative in your work.To be more specific:
To be neurobic, an exercise should do one or more of the following:
1. Involve one or more of your senses in a novel context. You can use additional senses to do an ordinary task by blunting the sense normally used. For instance:
Get dressed for work or take a shower with your eyes closed.
Eat a meal with your family in silence. Use only visual cues.or combine two or more senses in unexpected ways:
listen to a specific piece of music while smelling a particular aroma.
2. Engage your attention. To stand out from the background of everyday activities something has to be unusual, fun, surprising or evoke one of your basic emotions like happiness, love or anger:
Go camping for the weekend.
Take your child, spouse or parent to your work for the day.
3. Break a routine activity in an unexpected, novel way (novelty just for it's own sake is not highly neurobic).
Take a completely new route to work. Shop at a farmer's market instead of a supermarket. Completely rearrange your office and desktop
How a Neurobic exercise works.
Here's an example we use in the book of Jane returning home from work and entering her apartment with her eyes closed. What is actually happening in her brain that makes these few minutes of her day a Neurobic exercise.
“Tim Karas reached into her pocketbook and fished inside for the keys to her apartment. "Did I forget them?! No, here they are.He felt their shapes to figure out which one would open the top lock”.
TIM's keys are in the depths of her handbag, which is filled with dozens of different objects--eyeglass case, lipstick, tissues--each with a different texture and shape. Instead of using vision to quickly find the keys, as she might routinely do, she relies now on her sense of touch.
Because getting into her apartment is important to his, her brain's attentional and emotional circuits are alert and active as she touches the hard, smooth exterior of her lipstick case, moves past the soft feel of tissues and eventually identifies the keys. In her brain, long-dormant associations are being reactivated between the areas of her cortex that process touch, areas in the visual part of her cortex that hold the mental "pictures" of objects, and areas of the brain that stores the names of objects.
This reactivation causes specific groups of nerve cells to become more active in an unusual pattern for Tim's. This in turn can activate the cells' neurotrophin production and strengthen and build another set of connections in his brain's "safety net".
“It took her two tries until He heard the welcome click of the lock opening.”
Normally, placing a key in a lock uses a "motor memory"--an unconscious "map" in the parts of our brains that control movement--in conjunction with vision, which provides an ongoing feedback that allows us to sense where parts of our body are in space (this is called the proprioceptive sense). But this time Tim is trying to fit a key into a lock using the motor map in conjunction with her tactile, not visual, sense. And this non-routine action is activating and reactivating seldom-used nerve connections between her sense of touch and her proprioceptive sense.
“Touching the wall lightly with her fingertips, she moved to the closet on the right, found it and hung up her coat. He turned slowly and visualized in her mind the location of the table holding her telephone and answering machine”
On most days, and in most situations, Tim, like the rest of us, makes her way through the world using sight as a guide. Over time, her visual system has constructed a spatial "map" of her world in various parts of the brain. Her other senses of touch and hearing have also been tied into these maps, but these non-visual connections are rarely used in this situation. Today, however,Tim is using her sense of touch to trigger a spatial memory of the room in order to navigate through it. The touch pathways that access her spatial maps, usually inactive, are now critically important for accomplishing this simple task and unexpectedly get exercised. And the same holds true for her other senses.
“Carefully she headed in that direction, hoping to avoid the sharp edge of the coffee table by smelling the birthday roses...and hoping to have some messages from her family waiting on her machine.”
Here, Tim's olfactory system is kicking into high gear to do something it rarely does ã help smell her way through the world. The olfactory system has a direct line into the hippocampus, which is the area that constructs spatial maps of the world. The odor of the roses is working at several brain levels. The emotional association of roses with her birthday, combined with an important emotional goal of getting to her answering machine and retrieving messages from her family, makes them a strong, meaningful stimulus. Now Tim is constructing a strong new association--not only are flowers something that smell good, and make you feel good, but they can show you where you are in part of your world (and start the production of brain food in another set of brain connections ).
“Today was different...”
Yes, it was. By spending just a few minutes getting into her apartment with her eyes closed while doing all the things she normally would do when coming home, TIM had engaged literally dozens of new or rarely used brain pathways. Synapses between nerve cells were strengthened by these novel and challenging activities. And in response to their enhanced activity, some of TIM's brain cells were beginning to produce more brain growth molecules, like neurotrophins.
Furthermore, as a result of the exercise a small but significant change has occurred in TIM's brain. New sensory associations like the feel of the leather armchair and the smell of the birthday roses remained with her as part of her brain's vocabulary when she entered the living room the next day.
Something as simple as closing your eyes and using your other senses of touch, smell and spatial memory to unlock your door, enter your home at the end of the day and find your way to the coat closet and answering machine is a typical Neurobic exercise. What happens in your brain while you're doing this becomes exercise because different, underused nerve pathways and connections get activated. The result is the production of a kind of natural brain fertilizer that strengthens nerve connections and helps them and your nerve cell receivers (dendrites) stay younger and stronger. And the benefit of that is a fit and flexible mind ready to meet any mental challenge whether it be remembering a name or where your car keys are or mastering a new computer program or staying creative in your work.To be more specific:
To be neurobic, an exercise should do one or more of the following:
1. Involve one or more of your senses in a novel context. You can use additional senses to do an ordinary task by blunting the sense normally used. For instance:
Get dressed for work or take a shower with your eyes closed.
Eat a meal with your family in silence. Use only visual cues.or combine two or more senses in unexpected ways:
listen to a specific piece of music while smelling a particular aroma.
2. Engage your attention. To stand out from the background of everyday activities something has to be unusual, fun, surprising or evoke one of your basic emotions like happiness, love or anger:
Go camping for the weekend.
Take your child, spouse or parent to your work for the day.
3. Break a routine activity in an unexpected, novel way (novelty just for it's own sake is not highly neurobic).
Take a completely new route to work. Shop at a farmer's market instead of a supermarket. Completely rearrange your office and desktop
How a Neurobic exercise works.
Here's an example we use in the book of Jane returning home from work and entering her apartment with her eyes closed. What is actually happening in her brain that makes these few minutes of her day a Neurobic exercise.
“Tim Karas reached into her pocketbook and fished inside for the keys to her apartment. "Did I forget them?! No, here they are.He felt their shapes to figure out which one would open the top lock”.
TIM's keys are in the depths of her handbag, which is filled with dozens of different objects--eyeglass case, lipstick, tissues--each with a different texture and shape. Instead of using vision to quickly find the keys, as she might routinely do, she relies now on her sense of touch.
Because getting into her apartment is important to his, her brain's attentional and emotional circuits are alert and active as she touches the hard, smooth exterior of her lipstick case, moves past the soft feel of tissues and eventually identifies the keys. In her brain, long-dormant associations are being reactivated between the areas of her cortex that process touch, areas in the visual part of her cortex that hold the mental "pictures" of objects, and areas of the brain that stores the names of objects.
This reactivation causes specific groups of nerve cells to become more active in an unusual pattern for Tim's. This in turn can activate the cells' neurotrophin production and strengthen and build another set of connections in his brain's "safety net".
“It took her two tries until He heard the welcome click of the lock opening.”
Normally, placing a key in a lock uses a "motor memory"--an unconscious "map" in the parts of our brains that control movement--in conjunction with vision, which provides an ongoing feedback that allows us to sense where parts of our body are in space (this is called the proprioceptive sense). But this time Tim is trying to fit a key into a lock using the motor map in conjunction with her tactile, not visual, sense. And this non-routine action is activating and reactivating seldom-used nerve connections between her sense of touch and her proprioceptive sense.
“Touching the wall lightly with her fingertips, she moved to the closet on the right, found it and hung up her coat. He turned slowly and visualized in her mind the location of the table holding her telephone and answering machine”
On most days, and in most situations, Tim, like the rest of us, makes her way through the world using sight as a guide. Over time, her visual system has constructed a spatial "map" of her world in various parts of the brain. Her other senses of touch and hearing have also been tied into these maps, but these non-visual connections are rarely used in this situation. Today, however,Tim is using her sense of touch to trigger a spatial memory of the room in order to navigate through it. The touch pathways that access her spatial maps, usually inactive, are now critically important for accomplishing this simple task and unexpectedly get exercised. And the same holds true for her other senses.
“Carefully she headed in that direction, hoping to avoid the sharp edge of the coffee table by smelling the birthday roses...and hoping to have some messages from her family waiting on her machine.”
Here, Tim's olfactory system is kicking into high gear to do something it rarely does ã help smell her way through the world. The olfactory system has a direct line into the hippocampus, which is the area that constructs spatial maps of the world. The odor of the roses is working at several brain levels. The emotional association of roses with her birthday, combined with an important emotional goal of getting to her answering machine and retrieving messages from her family, makes them a strong, meaningful stimulus. Now Tim is constructing a strong new association--not only are flowers something that smell good, and make you feel good, but they can show you where you are in part of your world (and start the production of brain food in another set of brain connections ).
“Today was different...”
Yes, it was. By spending just a few minutes getting into her apartment with her eyes closed while doing all the things she normally would do when coming home, TIM had engaged literally dozens of new or rarely used brain pathways. Synapses between nerve cells were strengthened by these novel and challenging activities. And in response to their enhanced activity, some of TIM's brain cells were beginning to produce more brain growth molecules, like neurotrophins.
Furthermore, as a result of the exercise a small but significant change has occurred in TIM's brain. New sensory associations like the feel of the leather armchair and the smell of the birthday roses remained with her as part of her brain's vocabulary when she entered the living room the next day.
I have personally been doing this daily for 2 years and what it also does is train the brain to become a Better multi processor along with other great hidden advantages
Bud Karas
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