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You might see your child having difficulties with learning and memorizing new tings, remembering friends’ names, or missing some staff in his/her school backpack. Why? There are few possible answers. Your child may be eating poorly, not getting enough physical activities or sleep/rest. After checking off the above factors you can for some other solutions to help your child to improve his/her memory and mental performance by exercising his/her brain and teaching supportive techniques.
The human brain has an astonishing ability to adapt and change known as neuroplasticity. With the right stimulation, your brain can form new neural pathways, alter existing connections, and adapt and react in ever-changing ways. The brain’s incredible ability to reshape itself holds true when it comes to learning and memory. You can harness the natural power of neuroplasticity to increase cognitive abilities, enhance ability to learn new information, and improve memory. Let me share my findings with you.
Healthy Diet - What kind?
1. Look for healthy fats. Much of a brain cell's structure is made up of "healthy fats". The most important of these are the Omega-3 fatty acids. As your brain repairs itself and grows new neurons, it needs an abundant supply of Omega-3s from your diet such as cold-water fish salmon and albacore tuna, canola oil, soybeans, walnuts, wheatgerm, eggs, and flaxseed oil.
2. Provide antioxidants to protect brain. Good sources of antioxidants include tea (especially green tea), blueberries and other berries, red grapes, tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, spinach, carrots, whole grains, and soy.
3. Offer high-tyrosine proteins to spark brain. Besides neurons, your brain also includes important chemicals called "neurotransmitters". Neurotransmitters are the messengers that carry brain signals from one neuron to the next. You may have a great brain structure, but if your supply of the different neurotransmitters is insufficient your brain won't function properly.
Some components of neurotransmitters, such as tryptophan, can't be made within the body but must be consumed directly from your diet. Others such as tyrosine can be made by the body but still require the right foods in your diet. The best neurotransmitter-building foods for boosting alertness, energy, and concentration include seafood, meat, eggs, soy and dairy products. To avoid sabatoging yourself, eat the low-fat, low salt varieties (for example, eat lean cuts of meat or low-fat cottage cheese).
4. Supply water to hydrate brain. As you probably know, most of your body is water. It is very easy to not consume enough water and become dehydrated. Being even slightly dehydrated decreases your mental energy and can impair your memory. Drink at least three or four liters (quarts) of water a day. I like to carry around a one-liter bottle and just fill it up whenever I pass a water fountain. I've also have bottles of water stashed around my house and in my car. These act as constant reminders about drinking enough water.
5. Deliver vitamins & minerals. Certain vitamins and minerals are also important building blocks for your brain. The best way to do so is to supplement with vitamin and mineral tablets. The most important vitamins for memory are Vitamins C, B12, and B6. So take a Vitamin C supplement daily and consider taking a B Complex vitamin along with it.
Some important minerals for brain building include Iron (for women, especially) and Calcium. Deficiencies of either of these have been shown to impair learning.
An easy way to get most of your most important vitamins and minerals is to simply take a multivitamin each day. Personally, I take a multivitamin, a fish oil capsule (for Omega-3 fatty acids), a 1,000 mg Vitamin C tablet, and a B Complex vitamin.
Make sure you always take your vitamins with food and not on an empty stomach. Not only will you avoid a stomach ache, but vitamins and minerals need to combine with food in your digestive system or they will be to a large degree wasted.
6. Present fiber. Fiber helps slow the absorption of sugar from your diet. Your brain operates 100% on sugar. But the trick is that the sugar must be delivered in a very steady stream and in the proper amount or your brain gets overwhelmed. Eating enough fiber slows your digestion and results in the sugar in your food being delivered into your bloodstream gradually.
Foods containing healthy amounts of fiber include dried fruits (such as raisins, dates, prunes, and apricots), vegetables (such as green peas, broccoli, and spinach), peas and beans (such as black-eyed peas, lima beans, and kidney beans), nuts and seeds (such as flaxseed and almonds), whole fruit (such as apples with the skin, oranges, avocados, kiwi, and pears), and whole wheat grains (such as barley, brown rice, and the various whole wheat pastas and cereals).
to keep a good vitamin and mineral level - eat any of the following: alfalfa sprouts, soybeans, soy sprouts, crushed flaxseeds, garlic, green beans, sesame seeds, wheat, yams, pumpkin seeds, cucumbers, corn, apples, anise seeds, cabbage, beets, olive oil, olives, papaya, oats, peas, and sunflower seeds. Additionally, take evening primrose oil three times daily.
The following are many of the natural remedies and vitamins that you can take to help brain to remember: bacopin, beta-carotene, calcium, DMAE (dimethylaminoethanol), folic acid, ginko biloba, gotu kola, hawthorn, omega-3 fatty acids, black or green tea, rosemary, and schisandra and vitamin b12.
Physical Activities
When you exercise the body, you exercise the brain. Regular exercise improves blood flow to the brain, and improved blood flow often means improved thinking and memory Treating your body well can enhance your ability to process and recall information. Exercise may also enhance the effects of helpful brain chemicals and protect brain cells.
Appropriate sleep and relaxation time
Healthy Sleeping. When you’re sleep deprived, your brain can’t operate at full capacity. Creativity, problem-solving abilities, and critical thinking skills are compromised. Whether you’re studying, working, or trying to juggle life’s many demands, sleep deprivation is a recipe for disaster. But sleep is critical to learning and memory in an even more fundamental way. Research shows that sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, with the key memory-enhancing activity occurring during the deepest stages of sleep.
Relaxation/Fun Time. When you think of ways to improve memory, do you think of “serious” activities such as wrestling with the New York Times crossword puzzle or mastering chess strategy, or do more lighthearted pastimes—hanging out with friends or enjoying a funny movie—come to mind? If you’re like most of us, it’s probably the former. But countless studies show that a life that’s full of friends and fun comes with cognitive benefits.
Healthy relationships. Humans are highly social animals. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Relationships stimulate our brains—in fact, interacting with others may be the best kind of brain exercise. Research shows that having meaningful relationships and a strong support system are vital not only to emotional health, but also to brain health. In one recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, researchers found that people with the most active social lives had the slowest rate of memory decline.
There are many ways to start taking advantage of the brain and memory-boosting benefits of socializing. Volunteer, join a club, make it a point to see friends more often, or reach out over the phone. And if a human isn’t handy, don’t overlook the value of a pet—especially the highly-social dog.
Laughter is good for your brain. You’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine, and that holds true for the brain as well as the body. Unlike emotional responses, which are limited to specific areas of the brain, laughter engages multiple regions across the whole brain. Furthermore, listening to jokes and working out punch lines activates areas of the brain vital to learning and creativity. As psychologist Daniel Goleman notes in his book Emotional Intelligence, “laughter…seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely.”
Looking for ways to bring more laughter in your life? Start with these basics:
· Laugh at yourself. Share your embarrassing moments. The best way to take ourselves less seriously is to talk about the times when we took ourselves too seriously.
· When you hear laughter, move toward it. Most of the time, people are very happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it. When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?”
· Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily–both at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.
· Surround yourself with reminders to lighten up. Keep a toy on your desk or in your car. Put up a funny poster in your office. Choose a computer screensaver that makes you laugh. Frame photos of you and your family or friends having fun.
· Pay attention to children and emulate them. They are the experts on playing, taking life lightly, and laughing.
Keep stress in check - Stress is one of the brain’s worst enemies. Over time, if left unchecked, chronic stress destroys brain cells and damages the hippocampus, the region of the brain involved in the formation of new memories and the retrieval of old ones. Brain benefits of meditation
Get depression in check
In addition to stress, depression takes a heavy toll on the brain. In fact, some of the symptoms of depression include difficulty concentrating, making decisions, and remembering things. If you are mentally sluggish because of depression, seeking treatment will make a big difference in your cognitive abilities, including memory.
The scientific evidence for the mental health benefits of meditation continues to pile up. Studies show that meditation helps improve many different types of conditions, including depression, anxiety, chronic pain, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Meditation also can improve focus, concentration, creativity, and learning and reasoning skills.
Meditation works its “magic” by changing the actual brain. Brain images show that regular meditators have more activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with feelings of joy and equanimity. Meditation also increases the thickness of the cerebral cortex and encourages more connections between brain cells—all of which increases mental sharpness and memory ability.
Exercise Brain
By the time you’ve reached adulthood, your brain has developed millions of neural pathways that help you process information quickly, solve familiar problems, and execute familiar tasks with a minimum of mental effort. But if you always stick to these well-worn paths, you aren’t giving your brain the stimulation it needs to keep growing and developing. You have to shake things up from time to time! Memory, like muscular strength, requires you to “use it or lose it.” The more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and remember information. The best brain exercising activities break your routine and challenge you to use and develop new brain pathways. The activity can be virtually anything, so long as it meets the following three criteria:
1. It’s new. No matter how intellectually demanding the activity, if it’s something you’re already good at, it’s not a good brain exercise. The activity needs to be something that’s unfamiliar and out of your comfort zone.
2. It’s challenging. Anything that takes some mental effort and expands your knowledge will work. Examples include learning a new language, instrument, or sport, or tackling a challenging crossword or Sudoku puzzle.
3. It’s fun. Physical and emotional enjoyment is important in the brain’s learning process. The more interested and engaged you are in the activity, the more likely you’ll be to continue doing it and the greater the benefits you’ll experience. The activity should be challenging, yes, it should also be something that is fun and enjoyable to you. Make an activity more pleasurable by appealing to your senses—playing music while you do it, or rewarding yourself afterwards with a favorite treat, for example.
Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier
Mnemonics (the initial “m” is silent) are clues of any kind that help us remember something, usually by helping us associate the information we want to remember with a visual image, a sentence, or a word.
Visual image - Associate a visual image with a word or name to help you remember them better. Positive, pleasant images that are vivid, colorful, and three-dimensional will be easier to remember. Example: To remember the name Rosa Parks and what she’s known for, picture a woman sitting on a park bench surrounded by roses, waiting as her bus pulls up.
Acrostic (or sentence) - Make up a sentence in which the first letter of each word is part of or represents the initial of what you want to remember. E.g. The sentence “Every good boy does fine” to memorize the lines of the treble clef, representing the notes E, G, B, D, and F.
Acronym - An acronym is a word that is made up by taking the first letters of all the key words or ideas you need to remember and creating a new word out of them. E.g. The word “HOMES” to remember the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario , Michigan , Erie , and Superior
Rhymes and alliteration - Rhymes, alliteration (a repeating sound or syllable), and even jokes are a memorable way to remember more mundane facts and figures. E.g. The rhyme “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to remember the months of the year with only 30 days in them.
Chunking - Chunking breaks a long list of numbers or other types of information into smaller, more manageable chunks. E.g. Remembering a 10-digit phone number by breaking it down into three sets of numbers: 555-867-5309 (as opposed to5558675309).
Method of loci - Imagine placing the items you want to remember along a route you know well or in specific locations in a familiar room or building. E.g. For a shopping list, imagine bananas in the entryway to your home, a puddle of milk in the middle of the sofa, eggs going up the stairs, and bread on your bed.
6 Mnemonic devices
Visual image - Associate a visual image with a word or name to help you remember them better. Positive, pleasant images that are vivid, colorful, and three-dimensional will be easier to remember.
Example: To remember the name Rosa Parks and what she’s known for, picture a woman sitting on a park bench surrounded by roses, waiting as her bus pulls up.
Acrostic (or sentence) - Make up a sentence in which the first letter of each word is part of or represents the initial of what you want to remember.
Example: The sentence “Every good boy does fine” to memorize the lines of the treble clef, representing the notes E, G, B, D, and F.
Acronym - An acronym is a word that is made up by taking the first letters of all the key words or ideas you need to remember and creating a new word out of them.
Example: The word “HOMES” to remember the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario , Michigan , Erie , and Superior
Rhymes and alliteration - Rhymes, alliteration (a repeating sound or syllable), and even jokes are a memorable way to remember more mundane facts and figures.
Example: The rhyme “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to remember the months of the year with only 30 days in them.
Chunking - Chunking breaks a long list of numbers or other types of information into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Example: Remembering a 10-digit phone number by breaking it down into three sets of numbers: 555-867-5309 (as opposed to5558675309).
Method of loci - Imagine placing the items you want to remember along a route you know well or in specific locations in a familiar room or building.
Example: For a shopping list, imagine bananas in the entryway to your home, a puddle of milk in the middle of the sofa, eggs going up the stairs, and bread on your bed.
Tips for enhancing your ability to learn and remember
· Pay attention. You can’t remember something if you never learned it, and you can’t learn something—that is, encode it into your brain—if you don’t pay enough attention to it. It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory. If you’re easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
· Involve as many senses as possible. Try to relate information to colors, textures, smells, and tastes. The physical act of rewriting information can help imprint it onto your brain. Even if you’re a visual learner, read out loud what you want to remember. If you can recite it rhythmically, even better.
· Relate information to what you already know. Connect new data to information you already remember, whether it’s new material that builds on previous knowledge, or something as simple as an address of someone who lives on a street where you already know someone.
· For more complex material, focus on understanding basic ideas rather than memorizing isolated details. Practice explaining the ideas to someone else in your own words.
Rehearse information you’ve already learned. Review what you’ve learned the same day you learn it, and at intervals thereafter. This “spaced rehearsal” is more effective than cramming, especially for retaining what you’ve learned.
