Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Training your brain
Today is a Silver Medal day. Not a gold Medal day as that will come in a few weeks all being well, but a Silver Medal day, which is good enough for now. It's to do with my brain. Never having had a Silver Medal brain before, indeed at school I suspect the teachers wondered if I had a brain at all as I did so poorly, now at an age when one is politely described as being 'of a certain age', and thanks to a little book, I've managed to increase the oxygenation of my brain and the number of neurons and neural connections so it functions better.
I mentioned in a Podcast in late February that I'd come across this book called 'Train your Brain' by Dr Kawashima, promising '60 Days to a Better Brain (or your money back)'. Although the Amazon image doesn't show the refund promise, it's clear on the actual book cover along with the suggestion that you can achieve Better Brainpower, Better Memory and Better Creativity.
In his neuroscience lab, Dr Kawashima developed a series of exercises to activate the largest regions of the brain. In order to keep your brain healthy you need to exercise it regularly, eat healthily and sleep well. He discovered that certain activities use more of your brain than others. While meditating and watching TV uses small amounts of our brain, surprisingly too, solving difficult calculations also uses relatively little of our brain. But activities such as reading, writing and reading out loud use large amounts of your brain, and the process of solving very simple calculations extremely quickly uses even larger amounts of your brain.
One exercise that the book recommends you perform, is solving 120 simple arithmetical exercises extremely fast and this workbook provides 60 days of them. If you can do them in one minute you're at Gold Level, if you can do 120 of them 90 seconds you're at Silver Level and if you take two minutes you're at Bronze level. If you take longer than two minutes.....keep trying.
I have now been doing these exercises along with a few others you do at weekends or 6 weeks and I must say that my memory and thinking power has improved! Having started at worse than bronze level i.e. more than two minutes, I've cut my time and increased my speed of calculation and memory considerably. My partner has commented that I remember details more easily such as more names in films, what we had for lunch in a restaurant two years ago and I can now add at lightening speed. This stuff works.
Today is a Silver Medal day because it's the first time I've succeeded in breaking the 90 seconds barrier and I'm chuffed. The nice thing about this book is that it is a private occupation where only you know about how you're performing. Most of us can do simple exercises and it's more to do with the speed that helps stimulate the oxygenation and increase in neural connections. No one needs know how well or poorly you are doing (that is unless you publish it in your blog!) and you just keep a record in the back of the book on a graph so you can see your gradual improvement. When you get to the end of the book, you can just start again. It takes so little time...around 90 seconds, so there is no excuse. At this rate I will soon be able to remember my name!
:-)
