Age-related cognitive decline is normal and usually occurs gradually, starting at about age 30. As you age, your senses such as vision and hearing begin to weaken, slowing down the signals they send to the brain, which then slows the brain’s information processing.

The good news is that contrary to common wisdom, new brain cells are created throughout our entire life span. Physical exercise, good nutrition and cognitive effort can increase blood flow to the brain, which helps to enhance cognitive reserves.

Building ‘cognitive reserves’

Research supports the idea that cognitive reserves can benefit our brains for the long run. Autopsies performed on the brains of cognitively fit elderly people found that although their brains were full of plaques and tangles, their brains tolerated the damage better than others who had less mental stimulation in their lives.

Yaakov Stern, a neuropsychologist at Columbia University, explains that this shows our brains’ ability to build a “cognitive reserve.” He compares our brain to a telephone network: The more lines you have connecting different destinations the more likely you will be able to transfer calls via an alternative route even if some of the lines collapse. Whenever you engage in brain-stimulating activities, more neural connections are formed, reducing the effects of neural loss.

In addition, active brain cells stimulate a better blood supply so cells get more oxygen and nutrients. Stimulation also leads to more new branches to other brain cells, making an active neuron the hub of an interconnected network of cells. With increased connections, cells get more stimulation and generate more activity. Heightened brain cell activity also enhances production of Nerve Growth Factor, which further helps maintain cell health.

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Man, we buy! And when Christmas comes, we buy even more. A new study suggests that a war happens inside our brain when we shop: a fight between a pleasure center seeking the bliss of acquisition and an aversion center seeking to avoid the pain of paying.

As long as this makes sense, now it is also proven with fMRI scans. The importance of such finding is in its potential benefit of making wiser buying decisions.

So, can you train your brain to shop more wisely?

George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of the study suggests to put more thinking in the buying process, to avoid the pain.

Some methods to help you do it:

- Use cash instead of credit card,

- Studies show that people spend more when they feel down (or on the other hand, exposed to erotic material). Finding alternative activities when you are down can help balance your bank account…

- To avoid the brain wash happening in shops, especially in special sales, buy more online

- Buy less in a single store, and stay away from bargains!

Source: http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/12/22/your_brain_on_shopping/

Concept formation relates to making connections and seeing relationships between items of information, and defining a concept from it. Concept formation is a key skill required for learning of new ideas, thoughts or subjects.

The way that we learn new concepts is highly researched, and quite a few theories have been developed. You can get a taste of this amazing area through these studies we have picked up for you:

- Clark Hull (1920) and the stimulus-response association theory: we learn to associate a particular response (the concept) with a variety of stimuli that define the concept. For instance, we associate the concept “dog” with all of the characteristics of dogs (four legs, fur, tail, and so on) and are able to generalize the concept to unfamiliar dogs.

- Jerome Bruner and others (1956) and the strategy testing theorem: we develop a strategy of testing our hypotheses about a concept by making guesses about which attributes are essential for defining the concept.

- Eleanor Rosch (1978) and the natural concepts in everyday life: concepts are learned through examples rather than abstract rules. Her exemplar theory proposes that we learn the concept of “dog” by seeing a wide variety of dogs and developing a prototype of what the typical dog is like.

- Jean Piaget, argued that learning entails an understanding of a phenomenon’s characteristics and how they are logically linked. Noam Chomsky later argued that certain cognitive structures (such as basic grammatical rules) are innate in human beings. Both scholars held that, as a concept emerges, it becomes subject to testing: a child’s concept of “bird,” for example, will be tested against specific instances of birds.

As sometimes this is the process of developing abstract rules or mental constructs based on sensory experience, a more complex application of concept formation is how we relate to more general concepts. We choose to group and sort them into concepts will depend upon our interests, beliefs, values, and experiences with the environment. The concept “job” can have a positive meaning, or a place for achievements and wealth.

The concept formation allows us to create rules and generalizations and every field of our lives.

Brain training exercises can improve the cognitive functioning of people with ADD/ADHD, head injuries, Learning Disabilities (LD), schizophrenia, and other cognitive impairments. The brain training exercises work on the memory, attention, self-control, mental processing speed, and various other factors to improve the functioning of the brain.

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Science has never given much credence to claims that you can learn Chinese or French by having the instruction CDs play while you sleep. If any learning happens that way, most scientists say, the language lesson is probably waking the sleeper up, not causing nouns and verbs to seep into a sound-asleep mind.

Scientists at Northwestern University reported that playing specific sounds while people slept helped them remember more of what they had learned before they fell sleep, to the point where memories of individual facts were enhanced.

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Twitter lets you feel like you’re in on the current thing, and that’s satisfying. Sure, something may replace Twitter, or it may lose popularity and fade away.

Right now, though, a lot of people are using it and talking about it. It’s not possible to keep up with everything new – new music, new video-games, new TV shows, new iPhone apps – but Twitter is easy to use, so it’s a good place to start if you want to feel current.

Brain Gym is a training program which claims that any form of learning challenge can be overcome by finding the right movements. Brain gym program enables the people to practice different brain exercises that activate the brain for optimal storage and retrieval of information.

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The MS Technology Collaborative has created a large number of brain games for people living with multiple sclerosis (MS). People with MS develop cognitive challenges in the areas of processing speed, working memory and complex attention. These challenges involve difficulty in learning and remembering information, maintaining and shifting attention, and organizing work. These brain games help you battle against MS in an effective manner

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Task switching refers to the ability of a person to move from one rule-set to another rule-set corresponding to an external cue. In this document we will refer to the scenario of changing the current rule-set as “between” (since the brain game player changes between tasks) and non-transition trials will be referred to as “within” (as the player stays within the same task)

It is expected the “within” trials will be involved with performance costs:

– The response time in transition trials is expected to be longer.
– It is more likely to make errors in these trials.

In scientific literature “task switching” is mostly held as follows:

1. Setting a sign that informs what is the current rule set – mostly the sign is the color of the stimuli.
2. Practicing each simple rule application separately – practice a specific rule without rule transitions.
3. Task switching – alternating the current rule randomly, while having trials that require not rule transition and trials that require rule transition.

Further options:

* Rules can be made more complex with practice – conditioning response with more than one condition fulfillment. (For example – if player needed to respond to arrow pointing right, adding one more arrow and setting the rule to be – respond only if upper arrow points right)

* More rules can be added with time – (for example if player so far needed to click only red triangles and green circles now he also needs to click blue squares).

* Informing the player that next trial is a switch trial – research shows that there is a preparation effect – if the player knows in advance that a switch is due the costs of the transition is minimized. Same goes for non-random transitions, once the player knows the sequence the switching cost is reduced.

The rules should be presented to the memory game player at all times.

Brain games help you train and improve your brain and enable you in taking quick and effective decisions. This is because brain games require reasoning and logic and so they help a person in unlocking his potential quickly and easily. There is a host of brain games available online and these brain games online help you improve your memory.

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