True Health Project

While we know that diet and physical exercise are good for the brain; there are mental exercises and activities we can incorporate into our daily lives that are good for the brain as well. Three things that we can use to boost our brainpower include meditating, listening to music, and playing video games.

ONE – Meditation

Skin conditions, of all things, along with depression, diabetes, insomnia, asthma, high blood pressure, pain, anxiety disorders, and immune system weakness can all be ameliorated by meditation. Just exactly what is meditation? It can best be described as turning your mind into itself for deep contemplation and deep relaxation.

Researchers have discovered some surprising matters regarding the brains of meditators by hooking them up to brain-imaging machines. They saw that, during meditation, the subjects’ brain cells all fire at the same time, while in non-meditators the brain cells fired in a random and unsynchronized manner. Generally, when talking with meditators and non-meditators, the researchers found that meditators spoke of themselves as being at ease and creative more often than the non-meditators.

Meditators also show a commotion of brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex. That area of the brain has been associated with positive emotions. Folks who have the most activity in that brain area also had high levels of immune system efficacy.

Some other surprising physical differences were discovered, too. Meditators had thicker cerebral cortexes in brain areas associated with sensation and attention span. And it wasn’t because of more brain cell growth, but rather that the brain cells had more connections with each other, that there were a larger number of support cells, and that the blood vessels were larger. Because of the increased attention abilities and focus acuity, meditators were adept at cognitive tasks. They required less mental exertion with these cognitive tasks as well.

TWO – Music

Did you know that playing classical and soothing music can increase the milk yield of dairy cows? Among humans it can help with a number of afflictions: Anxiety. Insomnia. High blood pressure. It also can soothe patients suffering with dementia and help premature babies gain weight so they can leave the hospital sooner.

Music has many components: Volume. Pitch. Timbre. Melody. Rhythm. The auditory cortex analyzes these musical components. However, there’s more to music’s interaction with the brain than just the raw sound. Music can also activate your brain’s reward centers and depress activity in the amygdala, that area of the brain associated with fear or a number of other negative reactions or emotions.

Certain areas of the brain are bolstered by by musical training. The motor cortex, cerebellum and corpus callosum (it connects the brain’s two sides) are all bigger in musicians than in non-musicians. In string players, the sensory areas of the brain that help us feel vibrations through our fingers are larger than those who don’t play that type of instrument. It’s arguable that musical training makes one smarter, but children that receive that sort of training do have better spatial reasoning. And music lessons during childhood increase the sensitivity of the brain stem to the sounds of human speech. Even for kids who don’t have a “musical talent”, such training aids the fine-tuning of this part of the brain used to detect the subtleties of sound.

THREE – Video Games

Mental dexterity, along with superior hand-eye coordination, depth perception and pattern recognition, are traits enjoyed by most gamers. Gamers also have superior attention spans and information processing abilities. In one study, non-gamers agreed to spend a week playing video games and their visual-perception skills improved markedly. In another study, a researcher found that white-collar professionals who played video games are more confident and more social, giving lie to the perception that gamers are greasy, antisocial loners.

Some negatives must be mentioned. Gamers’ brains are less responsive to images of graphic violence, suggesting that these gamers have become somewhat desensitized to those images. And other research revealed that gamers had patterns of brain activity consistent with aggression while playing.

Video games activate the brain’s reward circuits, recent research has found. But this was true more so in men than in women. Hooked to MRI machines, men and women played a video game. Both women and men performed well, but the men showed more activity in the brain area that is associated with

reward processing. What is more, the men showed greater connectivity between the structures that make up the reward circuit, and the better this connection was in a particular player, the better that player performed. No real connections of this nature occurred in women. Of course, men are more apt to confess to being addicted to video games than are women.

Meditation, music, and video games may seem an unlikely group that boosts brain power and brain sustainability; they are all beneficial. Of course, we don’t want to give too much credibility to gamers, so we’ll tell them that moderation is good in all things. In other words, “Get off that game and get busy with your homework!” And, we all know that music soothes the savage beast. Meditate on that.

Photo by rss1981