Brain Exercises When You Want To Improve Memory

Did you know that the human brain is a complex and amazing organism? It's vital for life, yet there is so much that we don't know about it! One thing we do know though, is that if we don't exercise our brain and it's functions, our mental ability and capacity will decrease.

Mostly this is seen in old age (in cases like dementia and Alzheimer's) and when there is a brain injury or trauma; but to a lessor degree it affects every person in some way.

There are now many courses available on improving your memory, developing photographic memory or mental photography, but all of them revolve around using brain exercises to improve brain capacity, function and memory.

For those that just want some simple (i.e. free) and fun exercises, these can be found all over the internet. The benefit of these brain exercises is that as they get you to use new skills (such as in problem solving or lateral thinking) it creates new neural pathways and strengthens existing neural pathways in your brain. This opens up more and more of your brain capacity and part of that brain capacity is the function of memory. So as you improve your brain, of course you improve memory as well.

Online Brain Exercises

There are a number of sites on the internet where you can go and play some fun games. Often these will get harder as you progress through the levels. My two favourite sites are: braingle.com and lumosity.com. Both these sites have games, riddles, tests and trivia that will stretch you AND keep you entertained! I like them because they both have a lot of content in the one place.

But when you're not at a computer you can do puzzles in the newspaper such as sudoku or the crossword; and instead of watching TV all night, you could take half an hour out to read about a topic that is interesting to you.

Whatever brain exercises you choose to do, just the fact that you are exercising (and using) your brain will help you to improve memory and overall brain function. You can find more brain exercises to improve memory here.

Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve It

There's a bit of a buzz at the moment... a new book is out by Dr. Higbee that teaches you some of the tried and true techniques when it comes to improving your memory. His new book is called "Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve It".

The first point that Dr. Higbee talks about, is I think the perfect one to start with. It's all very well learning all these new skills and tips and techniques for improving your memory, but if you don't know how your memory works in the first place then possibly you won't be able to fully grasp the importance of the steps that you are learning?

How I Was Able To Improve My Memory With Photographic Memory

Photographic memory can be a scary phrase to someone like me who just wants to improve my memory. When people say 'photographic memory' I immediately conjour up images of savant's or highly intelligent humans who leave us gobsmacked with their ability to take in information and then recall it at will.

I've learnt that we are all born with a photographic memory, but as we grow up we lose that ability as we take on and learn new skills in our lives, such as reading.

However, that aside, the point still remains that we do have the ability to firstly just improve our memory and then ultimately develop photographic memory.

There are many courses you can do (which is what I did, I did the mental photography course by Zox Pro) which take your thinking and your brain to a whole new level, or there are simple exercises that you can do to improve your memory.

I started out just wanting to use my brain a bit more, so I would do the sudoku in the newspaper. At first it took me a while to grasp how they work but once my brain got used to the problem solving of sudoku's I was able to do more and more difficult one's. And so I moved on to crosswords.

This is what I needed to do to improve my memory. I could have stayed doing that and kept increasing my skills but I decided to take the plunge and do a full on course that would teach me more sophisticated techniques for improving my memory and developing photographic memory. But that's for another blog post.