Join the Hippocampus

During my short break, I was reading ‘Keep Your Brain Alive‘ by Lawrence C.Katcz and Manning Rubin. This book guides you to 83 Neurobic exercises to help prevent memory loss and increase mental fitness. I do recommend it for your own reading.

Neurobic is a unique brain exercise program based on the latest neuroscience to stimulate brain nutrients and helping new brain cells grow.

What brought me to write this blog is my interest in the Hippocampus. No, this is not where you send your pet hippopotamus to be disciplined. The Hippocampus is a part of your brain that forms and retrieving memory, also creates memory maps. It acts like a central clearinghouse, deciding what will be placed into long-term memory, and then, when called upon, retrieving it. In my blog, Mind Mapping Untold, I mentioned how to bring your visualization to actuality. When you begin to understand about Hippocampus and its function, you will also see the extended relativity to Mind Mapping.

If you do not want to further explore about your cerebral cortex and more, do not worry about it then. However, I do suggest that you learn how to do exercises related to your brain and its functions. This will help minimize the deterioration of memory as you get older.

Are you familiar with habitually looking for your house or car keys, unsure if you locked your car, misplaced something when in fact, you did not? For some, they are already suffering mild to severe Alzheimer disease that affects memory, thinking and their behavior too. Although so far, a clear cause of Alzheimer disease is not yet found, it is believed to be caused by a combination of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors that affect brain over time.

Just like physical exercise and balanced-diet for anyone, the brain also needs continuous stimulants. When you provide sensory, mental and imaging exercises to your brain, it will help the brain to remain active in the manner it should be worked upon.

Let’s take simple approaches in your daily living. If you are driving to work and back, using the same route repeatedly, it will make your daily travel possibly as boring as you have started the journey. If you do make spontaneous changes to your travel routes, it challenges you brain to rethink the alternate possibilities. It also provides new familiarization of your surroundings. This is what I normally do as well.

When I am driving to a designated place, I ask myself which alternative routes that I can take. Sometimes, there may be a short route and alternatively a longer route. On my return journey, I again ask myself if I would like to use any other possible routes or drive via a route that I am not very familiar with. Should I find poor road signage in some areas or if I do find buildings, locations, business addresses that may come to my interest, I try to memorize them. As a back-up plan, I write it down to my Notes, in my mobile phone, so that I can retrieve necessary information at time of need.

Other times, when I am at home, I challenge myself periodically, walking around with my eyes shut. I visualize in my mind, the layout of the house, my room or my living and walk to my destination. Of course, once a while, I might bump around the end of a chair or a table, but that is the challenge, triggering my sensory and activation my mental sight. More recently, I also took out a book on Calculus, and started working on the exercises. I have already parked a Trigonometry book as well. I find challenging the brain being a conscious objective to my progression.

I realized many of the things that I do with my mental and emotional challenges are written in this book. That is why I recommend it for your reading as I do find the guides provided being relevant and productive as well. In fact, you probably would have been doing some of the guides provides, only that you may not realize that it has been helping your memory enhancement.