10 Easy Ways to Boost Your Mental Abilities

Thinking is the basis of human activity, while every person has situations when he is not too happy with his own intelligence.

When you need to learn a lot of material for an exam or develop some large-scale project, you want to become a genius for a while. Here are 10 ways to improve your brain's higher cognitive functions.

Of course, constant lack of sleep and excessive coffee consumption have not benefited anyone yet, but the short-term positive effect of caffeine has been confirmed again by recent studies: coffee not only improves tone, it helps to focus on time-consuming tasks and improves almost all intelligence indicators, such as logical thinking or reaction time.

Scientists emphasize - do not think that caffeine makes you smarter, it just makes the brain work in a more efficient "emergency" mode, but constant overloads will necessarily result in rapid fatigue in the future.

Over the long history of drinking, mankind has discovered a lot of both positive and negative effects of alcohol. Recent experiments by Norwegian scientists prove that people who regularly drink wine (in moderation) on average show better indicators of cognitive functions in tests than those who abstain from alcohol, this pattern was especially pronounced in women.

Most researchers have recently been talking about the beneficial effects of a small amount of wine on thinking, speech coherence, attention and other higher mental processes. Fermented grape juice is believed to contain antioxidants that prevent brain aging, so, as our ancestors said, in vino veritas!

Excess sunlight is bad for the skin, but you should not completely avoid sunlight - vitamin D is good for the brain.

Scientists set up an experiment and found out that sunbathers coped better with test tasks than volunteers with low vitamin D levels.

As some researchers suggest, vitamin D has the property of slowing down the aging process of the brain, so if you are not a vampire, you can safely "recharge" with sunlight. But remember: everything is a good measure, otherwise you risk getting a sunburn.

In order for the head to work with maximum efficiency, it is necessary to be able to focus on a specific task: the brain is most effective when it is busy solving a single problem, unless, of course, you are Julius Caesar.

But, as it turned out in recent studies, sometimes it's better to really "let go" of your thoughts and think about something abstract — such a small "change" will then allow you to better perform tasks that require the participation of memory and increase overall thinking performance. Constant concentration on one or more things slows down the information processing process and "tires" the brain.

When a person begins to communicate with himself, many people usually twist their finger at the temple, suspecting problems with the head. After studying this phenomenon, scientists have come to the conclusion that thinking out loud really improves intelligence.

The participants of the experiment were required to find an object, while the influence of their replicas on the effectiveness of the search was recorded. The volunteers who recited the description of the search goal aloud coped with the task faster than those who were silent. Moreover, statements unrelated to the desired object did not give a pronounced effect, that is, there is no point in loudly repeating "refrigerator" if you can't find the keys at home.

Active physical exercises and dancing will help to avoid the onset of senility, scientists say.

When a person dances, his body and head work together: movements require clear psychomotor coordination, which increases attention and positively affects spatial orientation. Decisions are also made faster and, on top of everything else, learning new dance steps makes the thinking process more flexible.

Do you want to "pump" the brain? Sign up for a dance school, because it's not only beautiful, but also useful.

Often, certain foods are presented as a universal miracle remedy for increasing intelligence. Don't believe it: it's impossible to eat something for dinner and immediately become a genius. But it should be remembered that the quality of food has a great impact on both the brain and the whole body as a whole, so you can choose a diet so as to reduce fatigue and optimize mental effort.

For the successful work of the head, the body needs glucose (found in many fruits), unsaturated fatty acids (fish is rich in them), amino acids and antioxidants that are present in wine, as well as vitamin E, which can be found in nuts. Among other things, nutritionists advise to include blueberries, avocados and more cereals in the diet.

Interesting data were obtained by scientists who studied the functioning of the human brain while playing Tetris: short-term sessions of the game increased the amount of gray matter, improved the skills of solving spatial thinking problems, and also increased overall mental activity.

Another amazing feature of the well-known computer game is the smoothing of mental injuries: if you spend some time folding colorful bricks on the screen in a stressful state, negative impressions are more likely to be forgotten.

Now doctors are interested in an unexpected therapeutic effect in order to use this method to mitigate the effects of post-traumatic stress disorders.

There is a widespread opinion that bodybuilders and athletes are not distinguished by high mental abilities, but, as it turned out, this is not the case.

Physical education, of course, does not raise the IQ level, but improves blood circulation and increases overall tone, which allows the brain to work more efficiently. Researchers have experimentally found that physical exercise improves cognitive skills in children and adults by about 10%. At the same time, it is absolutely not necessary to develop a complex set of exercises — an ordinary run is enough to achieve a positive effect.

When it comes to the long term, improving mental activity will give a carefully selected set of foods, but when a momentary effect is required (for example, you have to take an exam), it is better to refrain from eating a dense meal.

The staff of the medical school at Yale University conducted an experiment on mice, and it turned out that rodents performed much better test tasks for higher cognitive functions when hungry. The reason for this lies in the mechanism of natural selection — when the brain "feels" hunger, the intensity of its work increases in order to shorten the time of searching for food.

Therefore, if you have to think about it, you should not eat "to the brim" - satiety does not contribute to the frolic of thought, but you do not need to arrange a hunger strike: it is important to find a golden mean.