The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution and is a compact miracle of about 1,000 billion nerve cells forming a network that some scientists believe to be the most complex system to be found anywhere in the universe. The human brain is continually adapting and rewiring itself and is the source of the conscious, cognitive mind. It is constantly learning by trail and error, inducing conclusions from past experience and creating new methods to deal with the situations it comes across.



One of the reasons it's so difficult for many people to focus and concentrate for long periods is this constant mental activity.

It's hard to focus and concentrate when your thoughts and emotions are constantly interfering with our attention, but the brain and mind are wired this way and it's completely normal.

Researchers have been telling us for years that the brain is a lot like a muscle. It behaves like a regular muscle when you exercise it. Specific mental exercises improve mental performance in specific areas of the brain.

To most people the brain does not feel as if it's a muscle, it's just an organ in the head that stores memories and enables thinking. But I assure you that with proper guidance and training you will soon discover that it behaves very much like a muscle. As you start to exercise it you will start to feel it. You discover that you can do more things with your brain and mind than you ever thought was possible.

Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don't use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive skills as it is for muscles.

Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to remodel its structure and function in response to outside stimuli. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change the brain's anatomy. Brain plasticity is at its peak with infants, when brains are most capable of adjustment but researchers have found that the brains capacity to change remains throughout life.

Exercising your brain and mind causes physical changes in the brain. You can change or strengthen physical connections between synapses or build new ones. Some physical changes in the brain may take just a few seconds or they may take hours or days to develop.

Researchers have found that you can build up specific brain areas by using exercises that affect those areas. There are programs available that use these discoveries to help the learning-disabled.

The areas of your brain that you use the most grow stronger over time and get more ingrained, fixed and habitual as the years go by. In effect you become more of the same.

When you really work out your mind, new dendrites grow and form new pathways for information and energy to flow through. Dendrites are thin branch like structures that convey information between brain cells. To make your left-brain more powerful you need to work hard on solving logical problems, math and language. By working hard on abstract, spatial or emotional problems your right brain becomes more powerful. To develop your frontal lobes, the master muscle of your brain, your exercises should focus on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks.

To exercise your body you go to the gym where you have specially made equipment to exercise and train specific muscles. The same goes for your brain. To exercise your brain you use "mental weights" to exercise and train the specific mental muscles you want to develop and make stronger.