5 useful techniques to maintain our brain

The brain is that part of the central nervous system of the vertebrates which is placed in the cranial cavity and is responsible for the cognitive functions and for the recognizing. The human brain not only takes part in the operation of the higher conscious functions but also in the making of movement patterns and their implement, creating different levels of perception patterns, in neuro-immuno-endocrine regulation of the homeostasis of the body and its neural-protective-internal regulation of its equilibrium, and in the vegetative functions.

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The structure of brain can be extremely complicated, for example each of the more than 100 billion nerve cells of the human brain can connect to up to 10,000 other neurons. According to our best knowledge, the nervous system has not a single cell from which it cannot anatomically reach any other cell of the nervous system. Although the weight of the human brain only 1-1,5 kg the myelin sheath nerve fibers inside of it reach the length of 150,000-180,000 km, and its cells have more connections than the number of stars on the Milky Way.

Huge amounts of information are stored, and in every moment there are thousands of complicated calculations take place just to operate our bodies in this miniature cosmos. By the way, this is the organ of our body, which stores our memories that make up the individual who we are. Everything what were important for us once, all that we have ever seen, heard, felt are stored in this small safe, and when it is needed it just evokes for us.

However, over time, just like us the brain is also able to age, slacken, become rigid that leads to decelerate our mind and lose memory. Nevertheless, we can efficiently slow down this process.

It is especially good for the brain if we sometimes get it out of its usual daily routine. The easiest way to do this is to find and take a different route to work. It is another solution if we do not start the sopping at the entrance of the store, but at the farthest line, or we can try to complete a safe and easy task at home blindfolded, we can try to write down our own name with our other hand or could just get out ourselves from our balance by simply standing on one foot.

We can force our brain into a new situation with these progresses, and to solve it, our brain has to use the regions of itself which are not often used otherwise.

There are a lot of beneficent effects of sport, for example it can increase the circulation of the blood, which is not only good for our muscles but also good for our brain. Beside this, sport creates many situations when our brain has to work to correct our balance, or makes many difficult tasks for it such as making exercises or just finding a new way during the daily jogging. Sports also take an important place in stress reduction.

Stress can release substances in the hippocampus that may damage many areas of the brain. In contrast, our body produces endorphin during exercise, which can help us to relax, slack, and thereby we can reduce or even avoid the daily stress. According to studies, over time the memory centre of the brain is slowly shirking, but researchers have certified that the volume of the hippocampus of older people who do sports regularly started to increase.

We can often hear or read about the beneficial effects of the Omega 3 fatty acids, which is no coincidence, because they have favourable physiological effects beside of other organs on the functioning of our brain, but it should not be enough for us.

We have to strive for serving the meal as healthy as possible for ourselves every day, and do it in the necessary portions and not even exaggerated.

Many think about sleeping as a necessary bad and they like to stay up until late at night, however, they also have to wake up early in the morning, because they have a lot of things to do, do not have enough time for everything and due to these reasons the time that is usable for sleep has to be cut short. For a fact, it is good to know, the symptoms caused by lack of sleep will appear soon such as fatigue, forgetfulness, irascibility and coordination problems in case our body do not get the daily 7-8 hours long sleep, which it needs. If we do not sleep enough our brain will also suffer, because brain proteins are not properly incorporated, and due to that learning and remembrance can be a hard activity, and additionally, our long-term mental freshness may be endangered, too.

In that period of our life when we go to school, we often have to learn things that we are not interested in and in the long run, it may also discourage us. However, in our free time besides school or after we passed the school we can choose the things we want to learn. We can choose things that we have long term plans with, but we can also change our interests within a few days or weeks. The only important thing is that we need to learn something from time to time or every day whenever it is possible. This does not mean that we must read an interesting fact about the world or just a wise quote every day, of course, this means that we have to try to remark or learn the thing which we read that we can recall it after a year.

First of all our short-term memory processes those huge amounts of information that we connect with day after day, and if our brain thinks of the data set as really important to us, then it puts it in our long-term memory. We can control this process consciously by repeating what we want to store over a long period of time, often for weeks, in this way the brain has connected with that information numerous times again and again so at last the brain put it in our long-term memory. For example in case of learning a foreign language, we only take a lesson once a week, most likely after a few days but certainly by the end of the week we will lose the half of the information which we learned. But if we repeat the lesson two or three times after the day when we are learned it we can significantly increase the quantity of memorized information.

Try to use the memory in everyday life and memorize important phone numbers, shopping list or in case we meet a new person just repeat the new name time after time to stimulate our brains to imprint.

Donát Novák

March 2020