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.

This constant mental activity is one of the biggest obstacles to good focus and concentration.

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.

It's good to know that the brain behaves much like a muscle. The more you train it the stronger it gets, so to make it more powerful you exercise it like you would a regular muscle.

Even though your brain looks like a mass of grey jelly and is very soft it behaves and reacts just like a muscle with rigorous mental workouts. You'll feel it as soon as you start exercising it regularly. Your brain will feel more powerful and you'll be able to do things with your mind that you can only dream of now.

Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama states that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children acquire new skills by rehearsing again and again until they can do it automatically. We need to practice regularly, or else we lose them. "Use it, or lose it" is as true for cognitive mental skills as it is for muscles.

Brain cells, like muscles, need exercise in the form of education or other stimulating experiences to stay healthy. Researchers have found that the brain's great capacity to physically change and become more powerful with experience - once thought to be limited to childhood - 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.

You can develop specific abilities just by practicing certain exercises that affect the areas of your brain where these abilities reside. Scientists have already created programs for learning-disabled children by using this technology.

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.

In order to keep your memory sharp, it has been thought that you have to grow new dendrites. Decades ago, it was discovered that we can grow new dendrites, the microscopic tentacles that reach out from each neuron to make connections with other neurons. If you repeat something you have learned, your neural pathways will become more and more efficient in that part of the brain. Work hard on solving logical problems, math and language to power up your left-brain. Work on abstract, spatial or emotional problems to make your right brain more powerful. And last but not least work on improving concentration, solving future related problems, multitasking and meta-cognitive tasks to develop your brains master muscle, the frontal lobes.

You go to the gym and use the equipment there to exercise and train specific muscles. The same applies to your brain. You use specific "mental weights" to exercise certain areas of the brain, and the mental muscles you want to make more powerful.