Neuroscience

CREATIVE-RIGHT VS LOGICAL-LEFT: FACT OR MYTH

April 21, 2023 by Kwik Team

You’ve likely heard that the right side of the brain is more creative than the left. It’s a widespread myth that has perpetuated for years. It’s talked about on television programs and in mainstream books. You can even take dozens of quizzes to tell you which one is your dominant side.

People who score on the right-brain spectrum are the more creative types, with strengths in thoughtfulness, intuitiveness, and subjectivity. Conversely, left-brainers are the thinkers, with strong skills in analytics, objectivity, and logic. While this is a widely held pop-culture belief, is there any proof that some people are right-brain creatives and others are left-brain logicians?

History of the myth

Right-brain versus left-brain thinking is based on the psychological concept of the lateralization of brain function. The brain has two hemispheres with each performing several roles. And there is some divided functionality. For example, the right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the body and vice versa.

After a treatment for epilepsy developed split-brain surgeries, scientists began studying each hemisphere individually. Cognitive neurologist and Nobel Prize winner Roger W. Sperry was one of those researchers, and his studies are largely responsible for the myth as we know it today. As part of a study treating refractory epilepsy, patients had their corpus callosum surgically severed. Composed of tightly wound nerve bundles, the corpus callosum is how each hemisphere of the brain connects and communicates with the other. When Sperry cut this communication pathway, he noted patients experienced other symptoms, such as being unable to process specific things when viewed from either the right eye or the left.

Sperry noted patients could not “see” words when shown through their left eye. He concluded that the left side of the brain was responsible for language, specifically speaking. However, while patients couldn’t articulate seeing words, they could choose the object without understanding why they picked it up. Through more experiments, he determined the functions affected by each side of the brain, creating the characteristics we associate with being right or left-brained.

What does the research say?

However, further research proves that the brain is not as dichotomous as Sperry’s theory shows. Take math as an example. While we credit math with being a left-brain logical-thinking skill, math requires using several different types of thinking. It uses multiple areas of the brain across both hemispheres.

Language is just as complex. For the brain to process language, it requires multiple parts of the brain on both hemispheres to work cohesively. You may not be able to speak a word, but your brain still interprets it and recognizes it.

Research found that this is due to what’s known as the ‘interpreter phenomenon’. Participants had to complete a puzzle. But the piece of the puzzle they needed was in their left hemisphere, while the picture of the complete puzzle was in their right. The right hemisphere could pick the correct piece, but when asked why they chose that piece, the left hemisphere—responsible for language—created a logical story. This research has been repeated in various forms, with similar results. Researchers concluded that the left hemisphere logically pieces together what the right brain is trying to communicate.

And modern research continues to prove that the right and left brain distinction is truly a myth. A study out of the University of Utah found that there is no indication of anyone using their right or left side dominantly. Even in tasks associated with one hemisphere over the other, multiple areas of the brain also lit up, proving that our brain functions as a whole—unless forced to operate separately. From a neurological perspective, it’s impossible to distinguish between the right or left hemisphere.

Applying whole-brain learning

Despite mounting evidence that people do not have a dominant brain hemisphere, the myth continues to prevail in today’s world. Dozens of websites associate the right-brain with emotion and spiritual growth, interpreting the intuition discovered in the above studies as overall intuitive ability. This led to self-help coaches and wellness gurus encouraging people to use and develop their right hemisphere more. On the other hand, the focus on STEM and other logic-oriented fields often tout the benefits of a strong left-brain. Multiple apps and programs are designed to focus on your left hemisphere.

But there are benefits to some of these approaches. One widely held belief was that training yourself to use your non-dominant hand would help “balance” your brain by activating your non-dominant hemisphere. And while that was debunked in modern research, using your non-dominant hand is beneficial for your brain. For example, when you brush your teeth with the opposite hand, you force your brain into active thinking. Brushing your teeth doesn’t require any brainpower. In fact, it’s a deeply embedded habit that you probably don’t spend any time thinking about. When you use your opposite hand, your brain can’t rely on the same patterns to trigger the habit sequence. This means you’re aware of what you’re doing and have to focus on the task. This helps improve your concentration, focus, and attention, and stimulates your brain in the same way learning something new does.

Another study found that training your non-dominant hand increased functional connectivity in the bilateral sensorimotor hand areas. It also improved the left-lateralized parieto-prefrontal praxis network, which is how your brain learns to perform specific skills and movements. Further, patients kept these improved skills long-term. Researchers believe they can use these findings to improve physical therapy exercises for patients suffering from stroke and brain injury symptoms.

Conclusion

Simply put, the pop psychology belief of two distinctly functioning hemispheres doesn’t capture the working relationship between the two sides. Some brain functions can occur on either side of the brain, but it’s a limited and limiting analysis. Your brain processes the world by utilizing several areas at once and rarely is anything in your brain associated with a single function.

How you think and process information is a complex process that isn’t easily captured with a bright infographic or an internet quiz. Instead, you are both right and left-brained and can harness either your creative strengths or your logical reasoning skills at any time. And the best brain exercises are ones that challenge your current skill-set and help you learn new ones.

If you want to learn more about how the brain works individually and as a whole, check out this video:

8 AMAZING MOVIES ON MEMORY

April 14, 2023 by Kwik Team

When it comes to fascinating ideas to explore, Hollywood loves to use memory as a driver of blockbuster plots. It appears in everything from contemporary pieces on how diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia affect individuals and families, to implanting fantastical memories in far-off futures. But how realistic are these portrayals of memory in movies? In an on-going series, we’re going to explore popular movies with memory as a core component of their plot, and find out how accurate they really are. Here are the first eight movies on memory.

Total Recall (1990)

Rekall gives you the chance to remember a life you never lived. But what happens when the false memories unlock real memories, and your life is never the same?

Dennis Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker who keeps having dreams about Mars featuring a mysterious woman. He’s never been to Mars, and likely never will. So he decides to visit Rekall, a company that implants false memories. There, he chooses a fantastical adventure where Mars has a blue sky and he’s a secret agent. But halfway through the procedure things go wrong. And suddenly Quaid is on the run, trying to figure out which memories are real and which are fake.

Total Recall tackles memories on two fronts. There’s the fake memories Rekall offers to implant in your brain, and the repressed memories sinister forces are trying to keep Quaid from remembering. While memory implantation was the stuff of science fiction when this movie first came out, starting in the early 1990’s research started showing that it was possible to successfully implant memories through various techniques. In fact, just having family members alter the narrative of family events had a 37% success rate in individuals remembering a fictional event. Science has only progressed since then. In 2019, scientists were able to surgically implant false memories in mice. They were also able to alter actual memories. And research indicates we can suppress memory, too.

50 First Dates (2004)

When a man meets the girl of his dreams he never imagines that he’ll have to win her over every single day.

Living in Oahu is perfect for serial dater Henry Roth (Adam Sandler). With plenty of tourists, he never has to see the same woman twice. Until he sees Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore) building a house out of her waffles. When he can’t get her out of his head, he goes back to try to ask her on a date. But she doesn’t remember who he is. And because a brain injury means she loses her memories every night, she never will.

While the name “Goldfield’s Syndrome” that Lucy suffers from is fictional, the actual amnesia is real. It’s a form of anterograde amnesia and the film is surprisingly accurate in how it portrays the symptoms. There are patients who “reboot” after going to sleep, losing all the memories they created during the day. And the character Ten-Second Tom, who could only remember new events for ten-seconds was also based in truth. Clive Wearing is one of the most famous amnesia patients who could only retain new memories for seven seconds.

Even the Hollywood ending where Lucy somehow remembered Henry is based in truth. Clive denied keeping a journal but knew where it was. He also recognized his wife even as she aged ten, twenty, and thirty years, and never was surprised that she—or even he—was aging. It seems that while patients with this type of amnesia can’t access new memories, they are coded somewhere in the brain and patients indicate this in surprising and unexpected ways.

Memento (2000)

A man is on a mission to find the men who killed his wife. The only problem is he has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) lives his life through tattoos and post-it notes. They’re the only clues he has to remember his mission: finding the men who hurt his wife and caused his amnesia. He relates the story of an insurance claim he turned down, where he believed a man was faking amnesia. As Leonard follows the clues inked on his body, the two stories intertwine in a shocking and unexpected twist.

The movie is told both chronologically and in reverse order, indicated by either color film or black-and-white, but fold together at the end to form one cohesive narrative. The black-and-white portions give the audience the truth of Leonard’s life, while the color scenes throw the viewer into Leonard’s current experience. The result is a shockingly accurate portrayal of what it would be like to live life without the ability to retain new memories. Though the film has a dark twist, with Leonard using his amnesia to willfully alter what he believes is the truth, it does show how disorienting life becomes when you can’t retrieve new memories. In fact, doctors and memory experts have lauded the film for how accurate this portrayal is.

Still Alice

A linguistic’s professor is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease just after her fiftieth birthday.

Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) has a successful life. She’s a linguistic professor at Columbia University, her husband (Alec Baldwin) is a physician, and she has three adult children. But her life takes an unexpected turn when she forgets a word during a lecture and gets lost jogging on the familiar campus. The incidents spark a visit to her doctor, where she is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. As the disease progresses, life changes substantially for both Alice and her family.

Early onset Alzheimer’s disease is when symptoms occur in patients younger than sixty-five years old. It is one of the more rare forms of the disease, affecting only 5 – 10% of Alzheimer’s patients and 60% have a family history. Still Alice gives a hauntingly realistic portrayal of the disease, though experts indicate that the progression of symptoms occurs much faster than normal. That doesn’t make the film inaccurate, though. Some patients can see a rapid cognitive decline in a similar timeline as Alice. If anything, the film doesn’t indicate that the form Alice suffers from is rare, making it slightly misleading. But overall, it does a fantastic job showing how difficult Alzheimer’s disease is from both patient and family perspectives.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

A woman sees a murder during a blackout. But just because she can’t remember, that doesn’t mean she’s safe.

Alcohol ruined Rachel Watson’s (Emily Blunt) life. She lost her job and her marriage. Now, she rides the train into New York City every day, where she goes by her ex-husband’s new home with his new wife and their new baby. And she takes her obsession further by harassing the couple when she’s drunk. When she sees their married neighbor kissing a stranger, she decides to intervene. But the next day she wakes up covered in blood and hungover, with no memory of what happened. Rachel struggles to piece together a timeline of events to clear both her name and her conscious.

There are several different types of blackouts that alcohol can induce. Rachel suffers from what’s known as “fragmentary blackouts” where her memories are spotty rather than completely gone. Because she remembers fragments of events, she then strings together a narrative of what she believes happened. The memories are there, which is how she can piece together the truth in the end. This is the most common type of blackout people who drink alcohol suffer from, and the adverse affects to Rachel’s life are also accurately portrayed.

The Father (2020)

A father and daughter navigate life with dementia in a heartbreaking and exceedingly humane depiction.

After Anthony Evans (Anthony Hopkins) fires his caregiver, his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) visits him. She wants to move to Paris, but can’t leave him in his flat if he keeps firing his caregivers. Though he struggles to remember events and frequently loses objects, Anthony refuses to move. But Anthony continues to wake up in different places, sometimes with people he knows, other times with strangers. As Anthony struggles to piece together his life, he desperately holds onto logic and rational thinking, even when those two things seem to evade him the most.

Experts praised The Father for its stunningly accurate embodiment of dementia, with an entire paper published on the NIH relating the accuracy of the movie. Where some films ease the harshness of the disease, the film drops the viewer into a nonlinear narration, showing exactly how disorienting dementia truly is. Through clever camera work and an Oscar-winning performance, we see exactly how each stage of dementia looks and feels. Memory is slippery, time gets muddled, and facts become elusive. It also highlights the difficulty of the patient-caregiver relationship as the symptoms of the disease progress. Overall, the Father hits all the medical notes, covers medication options, how dementia feels from a patient perspective, and it’s all wrapped in a mystery for the viewer to unravel.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

A man discovers that his ex-girlfriend erased her memory of their relationship. But when he tries to do the same, he discovers he doesn’t want to forget and fights to keep his memories with her.

Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and his girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) don’t have the perfect relationship. But he never expected her to erase him entirely. He decides two can play that game, and visits the same clinic to undergo the procedure. As Joel relives their happier moments, he realizes he doesn’t want to forget Clementine. The more he fights to keep his memories intact, the harder the company works to delete them entirely, forcing Joel to face the truth of why they drifted apart and maybe give him a map to find her again.

While memories can be planted, deleting an entire relationship isn’t possible yet. But the film does create a fictionalized possibility through the very real process of reconsolidation. Rather than memory being a fixed “thing” in your brain, neuroscientists believe the brain recodes a memory every time it’s retrieved. In theory, if you block the protein synthesis that occurs when synapses connect neurons—what happens in memory reconsolidation, you could technically target a memory and erase it. Though they don’t go into detail, the process the company uses in the movie vaguely appears to be doing exactly this.

The movie also does a fairly accurate representation of how memory is formed in the brain, particularly through Joel’s journey through his mind as he tries to escape the procedure. While there are a lot of technical aspects the movie could hone in on, instead it focuses on the important role emotion plays in forming, storing, and retrieving memory. Overall, while the techniques might be plausible, they still aren’t possible—yet.

Trance

When a heist goes wrong, a valuable painting goes missing. The only problem is the person who took it can’t remember where it is.

Simon Newton (James McAvoy) was more than the auctioneer. He was the inside man. But when he attacks the leader in the middle of the theft, he gets hit on the head. When he wakes up, he has no memory of what happened in the moments before and after the attack. Through the help of a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson), he works to uncover his lost memories. But the truth is far more complicated than he ever imagined.

This tightly woven thriller has plenty of twists and turns, all tied to how head injuries can lead to memory loss. In cases of traumatic brain injuries, less than 3% of people had no memory loss. On the other side, 45% experienced memory loss for a month or longer. Clinicians were wary of hypnosis as an effective tool for memory recovery, however, more studies are emerging that show certain hypnotic techniques can be effective in helping patients with traumatic brain injuries recover lost memories while also aiding in alleviating anxiety and post-traumatic symptoms.

Conclusion

As science catches up, many plots that were once the stuff of science fiction is now shifting towards reality. Stay tuned for more amazing movies on memory, and our analysis of how accurate they are.

If you’re interested in improving your memory, check out our Kwik Recall class, where in 31 days you’ll unlock your ability to learn faster, remember more, and unlock your limitless potential.

THE BEST BRAIN DISCOVERIES OF 2023—SO FAR

April 7, 2023 by Kwik Team

The human brain has long been a mystery. It’s one of the most powerful organs, capable of creating thought, memory, and learning. But scientists have struggled with unlocking exactly how it does these incredible feats. The good news is that every year, more studies and more studies are done. And scientists are discovering more about the brain than ever before. Every month, researchers release dozens of new findings, each one helping to unlock the mysteries that have long eluded science before. We went through the latest neuroscience journals and found five of the best brain discoveries of 2023.

Breathing Network Unlocked

New neuroscience research identifies a respiration-related brain network

Neuroscientists are one step closer to understanding how breathing affect neural networks in the brain.

Breathing is a fundamental physiological process. The brain controls breathing in the same way it controls all other automatic functions. And scientists know a decent amount about how breathing affects the brain. They know the brain stem controls how you breathe. And that breathing modulates neural activity in various regions in the brain. But the exact extent of that neural control was largely unknown.

Scientists relied on fMRI scans to trace respiration and neural function. But the scans had a difficult time discerning if neural activity was because of breathing or normal C02 fluctuations and body movement.

A new study by Nanyin Zhang, the Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Brain Imaging and director of the Center for Neurotechnology in Mental Health Research at Penn State discovered a respiratory network in the brain. For the first time, they were able to map neural responses throughout the brain that were modulated by respiration. Essentially, they’re able to determine exactly how breathing patterns can impact neural activity directly.

While scientists have known that breathing can change your emotional state, and vice versa, the exact mechanisms taking place in the brain were still vague. By pairing fMRI technology with electrophysiology, they hope to further study how breathing can modulate neural activity in practices like deep breathing, meditation, and more.

Read more, here.

Zipping Up Tasks

The human brain ‘zips and unzips’ information to perform skilled tasks

A new study discovered the underlying mechanism of ‘muscle memory’. Rather than remembering an activity as a whole, the brain actually ‘unzips’ each individual movement before ‘zipping’ them back together in the right order of operations to complete the task. Before this discovery, neurologists believed the brain stored activities and tasks as one cohesive behavior.

They also discovered that the brain stores specific components of these actions in different motor areas of the brain. The brain further separates the tasks into order sequence and timing, and then combines them when it’s time to perform the task.

Researchers believe that storing these elements individually and reviewing them before executing the movements allows for greater flexibility and resilience. Participants had an easier time learning new sequences when the timing of the activity, in this case finger presses, was the same. But learning a known activity with a new timing was more difficult. They hope this discovery will help design new therapies for stroke patients and other brain injuries.

Read more, here.

Alzheimer’s Immune Cell Discovery

A new study indicates that T cells play a key role in tau-related neurodegeneration, a finding that suggests new treatment strategies for Alzheimer’s and related diseases.

Several clinical trials are underway examining the role immune cells play in Alzheimer’s and other neural degenerative disease. Many studies focus on the microglia for treatment, as they are the brain’s immune cells. If activated at the wrong time or in the wrong way, rather than protecting the brain, they can actually damage neural cells. Researchers out of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that neurodegeneration happens when microglia partner with T-cells. T-cells are powerful immune cells designed to attack and kill foreign particles.

Patients with Alzheimer’s disease have large numbers of T-cells in their brain. But scientists didn’t understand why or that this increased number was contributing to neurodegeneration. A new study focused on tau-related neurodegeneration in mice found that when the brain blocks T-cells from entering, those individuals could avoid neurodegeneration.

Tau is a protein that helps stabilize nerve cells in the brain. However, too much of the protein activates the microglia, which then attracts T cells into the brain to fight the buildup. At a certain point, this buildup also begins collecting tau, and that’s when the disease begins to noticeably progress.

Xiaoying Chen, PhD, an instructor in neurology and first author of the study, looked at four study groups of mice. The first two had amyloid beta buildup, the third had tau buildup, and the fourth was a healthy brain group. The third group had the most neurodegeneration and also had the highest level of T cells in the brain. Further, the concentration of T cells was the highest where neurodegeneration occurred. The study found that when they prevented T cells from entering the brain, they prevented most of the neurodegeneration. Researchers are excited to continue studying how this might help prevent tau-related disease from damaging the brain.

Read more, here.

Lab Grown Neurons

Researchers out of Northwestern University have successfully created mature neurons from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This is the first time they’ve been able to create these highly mature neurons. Previously, they could create neurons from stem cells, but they were immature and difficult to use in many therapeutic interventions.

The research team took the iPSCs and used a breakthrough technique discovered last year by Northwestern professor Samuel I. Stupp known as ‘dancing molecules’. They then coated them with synthetic nanofibers. This process created a mature neuron that didn’t clump together the way immature neurons using stem cells previously did. Even more exciting, these new neurons weren’t simply more mature, they also displayed better signaling and branching capabilities. That makes them more likely to integrate in the brain and create more synaptic connections.

Researchers are testing new ways to apply their findings. One area of focus will use patient skin cells, converting them into iPSCs, and using them to treat spinal cord injuries and neurodegenerative disorders. In addition to researching new therapeutic protocols, researchers can also use these mature cells to simulate degenerative diseases in order to study how they can be prevented in the future.

Read more, here.

Tune Brainwaves for Learning

Tuning into brainwave rhythms speeds up learning in adults, study finds

Research out of the University of Cambridge shows that not only does every brain have a unique rhythm pattern, but tuning into those wavelengths dramatically improves learning. This is the first time a study has synchronized learning to specific and individualized brain wave patterns.

The study used electroencephalography, or an EEG machine, to tune into the natural brainwave patterns of the participants and find their exact peak alpha wave performance. Alpha waves are the frequency your brain is in when you’re awake and relaxed. Studies show that this is where you feel calm and creative.

Before being presented with new learning material, they showed participants a 1.5-second pulse pattern to tune their brain to various brainwave patterns. This process is called “entrainment”. They gave some peak performance frequencies, other’s low performance, and other’s random patterns. Participants then had to complete over 800 cognitive tasks. Individuals attuned to peak performance brainwaves performed three times faster than all other groups.

Researchers believe that these new findings can help maintain neuroplasticity as people age and encourage lifelong learning. While this study focused on visual perception, researchers believe this approach can enhance motor skills and even auditory learning. Even more exciting, less invasive devices such as headbands can create similar results outside of clinical settings.

Read more, here.

If you want to learn more about how devices like Muse can help enhance your learning, watch this video:

7 EASY WAYS TO TRAIN YOUR MEMORY

March 31, 2023 by Kwik Team

Why should you train your memory?

Your memory is a priceless asset that you should not only take care of, but spend time developing. One way to do this effectively is to get in the habit of training your mind through daily brain exercises. As you learn new skills, your brain continues to grow—even as you get older. However, not exercising your brain might cause memory loss and an inability to cope with stress. Here are seven reasons to train your memory.

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Daily brain workout and new brain pathways

When you reach adulthood, your brain has built millions of neural pathways that help you function. These networks help you remember information quickly, perform routine tasks, and solve common problems with the least amount of mental effort. Memory is a muscle, and you have to use it or lose it. The more you train your brain, the better you can process and recall information. Make them part of your daily routine by scheduling time and increasing the challenge. The more you use your brain, the more new brain pathways you can grow.

Physical exercise

Physical exercise helps your brain stay strong, just like mental exercise. It raises oxygen levels in your brain and decreases the risk for disorders that leads to memory loss, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Training your brain also aids in reducing stress hormones. Most significantly, it plays a vital role in neuroplasticity by strengthening development and stimulating new neural growth. So, choose activities that get your blood pumping, such as aerobic exercise. Remember, what’s good for your heart is also good for your brain.

Good sleep

For your brain to work at optimal levels, it needs a good night’s sleep, in addition to all the training throughout the day. Over 95% of adults need seven and a half to nine hours of sleep every night to avoid sleep deficiency. There is a difference between the amount of sleep you need to work at your best and the minimum amount of sleep you can get. Studies show that sleep is essential for memory consolidation, with the key memory-enhancing activity happening through the deepest stages of sleep. Compromising on sleep—even for a few hours—may affect memory, problem-solving abilities, creativity, and thinking skills. One way to get better sleep is by turning off all screens at least one hour before bed. The blue light emission in tv, phone, and computer screens may trigger insomnia and suppress melatonin, the sleep hormone.

Meaningful relationships

Countless studies show that a life filled with friends and fun has many cognitive benefits. Healthy relationships are the ultimate brain booster. Humans are highly social animals and have evolved to survive in groups, not isolation. Socializing with others may offer the best kind of brain stimulation and mental exercise. Meaningful friendships provide a strong and vital support system for our brain and emotional health. There are many ways to take advantage of the memory-boosting benefits of socializing. You can join a club, see friends regularly, or do volunteer work. You can also enjoy similar emotional benefits of owning a pet, especially a dog.

Stress

Stress is one of the worst enemies of the brain and can lead to memory loss. Over time, chronic stress destroys brain cells and may shrink the region of the brain that creates new memories and recovers old memories. Training your brain helps you notice your stress levels, so that you can take steps to calm your mind when it becomes overpowering. Decreasing your stress levels slows the release of stress chemicals and helps protect your brain against long-term damage.

Laughter is the best medicine

Physiologist Daniel Goleman wrote in his book, Emotional Intelligence, “laughter seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely”. It engages multiple regions across the brain and as well as the body. Watching a comedy and listening to jokes activates an area of the brain associated with learning and creativity. Surround yourself with playful and fun-loving people. Humor and laughter are infectious. Frame photographs with memories of you and your loved ones having fun. Interact with children, as they are experts on playing, laughing, and taking things lightly.

Brain-boosting diet

The brain needs fuel, just like the body. A diet based on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fats—such as nuts, fish, olive oil, and lean protein—supplies a lot of health benefits and also improves memory. Research shows that omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial for brain health. If you don’t like seafood, you can find other sources of omega-3 in foods like walnuts, ground flaxseed, winter squash, seaweed, spinach, broccoli, pumpkin seeds, and soybeans. Ensure you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables in your daily diet. Packed with antioxidants, these organic foods guard your brain cells against harm.

Conclusion

You need to train your memory, and there are many ways to do that. By maintaining good brain health, your memory will last well into old age.

For more tips on how to train your limitless brain, watch this video:

10 ADVANTAGES OF A TRAINED MEMORY

March 23, 2023 by Kwik Team

The benefits of a trained memory affect several aspects of your daily life. It prepares you for new challenges, improves attention, and strengthens cognitive skills in your daily routine. Your brain continues to learn and grow as you age, but you have to train your memory at regular intervals.

Here are ten advantages of having a trained memory.

Stronger Memory

Brain training expands your memory and helps you remember daily tasks or information. Things like where you left your keys, managing your household finances, and recalling telephone numbers or names.

Active memory is when your short-term memory keeps information ready and easily accessible. Working memory is where you complete those tasks. Long-term memory contains all of your experiences and allows you to recall those memories for extended periods of time.

Brain exercises are the most effective and complete memory workout on hand because they use all aspects of your memory actively, keeping those neural pathways clear.

Enhanced Creativity

One of the most important benefits of having a trained memory is that it enables you to imagine things from different angles. It results in better problem-solving abilities, greater flexibility, and more creative ideas.

Adaptable thinking allows you to go beyond looking at only the facts present to solve a problem. You can extend basic logic when you analyze information to arrive at different conclusions.

Brain training includes flexibility games, such as taking images or symbols and extending a pattern using a set of rules, which results in improved creativity.

Sharper Focus

Memory training improves your concentration, attention, and multitasking ability significantly. In short-term memory, attention is essential. In order for information to enter and remain available for processing, you have to notice it first.

The modern world is full of distractions. Social media, advertisements, and email all have notifications pinging and dinging to grab your attention. You might feel pulled in several directions, diverting your focus and attention to multiple tasks at a time.

Brain training helps you narrow your focus so you can give your full attention to one task at a time. It’s possible to train your focus, and that means never losing important information from distraction again.

Improved Attention

Memory training can also sharpen your visual skills by training your spatial and visual abilities. You learn to identify visual patterns and recall shapes. To help with recall and memorization, you’ll practice using your imagination to visualize various items to associate with what you’re learning.

These exercises give you deeper awareness of your surroundings and help you find details you might have missed before. You also get better at active listening because you’re engaged in remembering what the speaker is saying more than what you want to say next.

Quick Reaction Time

Slow reactions can be a constant source of frustration, particularly in the modern world, where almost everything depends on fast responses based on your power of evaluation.

For example, the ability to be a good driver depends on these three factors: the ability to assess the situation, sharper concentration, and quick reaction times.

As you train your memory, speed drills help decrease your reaction times to multiple situations in your life. They also strengthen the pathways in your prefrontal cortex, improving your decision-making and problem-solving skills.

Extended Vocabulary

By enhancing your ability for auditory processing, brain exercises can help with language fluency. Repetitive exercises help you find words easily, increase memorization, and allow you to speak with confidence.

You can apply memory exercises by learning a new language. As you apply unfamiliar words and grammar to your base knowledge, you broaden your grammatical understanding of your primary language.

Enhanced Working Memory

Working memory acts to merge the temporary storage and the processing of information. It allows comprehension, problem solving, and reason. But it has a limited capacity, which means it needs flexibility to perform daily tasks efficiently.

Training your memory requires you to use your working memory as you practice active recall. While it can’t increase your working memory too much, it helps ensure that you can maximize your memory capabilities to get more done when you need to.

Longer Short-Term Verbal Memory

Verbal short-term memory is similar to short-term visual memory. It preserves audio representations of words, numbers, and objects in terms of language.

This is important when it is comes to learning a new language, being able to comprehend instructions, and being an active listener in any conversation.

Faster Visual-Spatial Short-Term Memory

Visual-spatial memory is where visual information is stored for a short time. You use this memory whenever you want to remember visual details like a map or someone’s facial features.

When you train your memory, you learn to remember visual cues based on connecting them to other pieces of your long-term memory. This means you get better at making visual connections to new items quickly and effectively.

Conclusion

These are only a few ways you can benefit from having a trained memory. It has a positive impact on your daily lifestyle. Having a trained memory will help you develop new mental skills and will sustain your memory as you age.

If you want more information on how to learn faster, watch this video:

8 BETTER SLEEP HABITS

March 17, 2023 by Kwik Team

What if you could change your daily habits and get better sleep? On average, you’ll spend approximately 26 years asleep. That’s over 9,000 days or almost 230,000 hours. It’s an essential part of your life and is vital to your overall health, particularly your brain health.

Your body needs an average of seven to ten hours of sleep a night. However, busy lifestyles, stress, and even changes in sleep patterns as you age can chip away at how much sleep you end up getting. Because sleep is such a vital part of your existence, developing healthy sleep habits is one thing you can do to take better care of your body and brain.

1- Set a sleep schedule

Of all the things you can do in order to ensure you get healthy sleep, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day is the most important. One common misconception is that you can catch up on sleep. Unfortunately, it takes up to four days to recover from one hour of lost sleep. Maintaining a consistent sleep schedule keeps your brain happy and healthy.

2- Exercise daily

It may seem counterintuitive, but staying active throughout the day is a fantastic way to keep your sleep on track. Being active for 30 minutes a day improves sleep quality for myriad reasons. It releases endorphins and lowers cortisol levels in your brain, which work to keep your brain awake. It also stabilizes your sleep-wake cycle so you can not only fall asleep at consistent times but fall into a deeper, higher quality sleep, as well.

3- Be aware of lighting

Your circadian rhythm largely drives your sleep-wake cycle. And this rhythm is directly affected by light—specifically blue light. Sunlight is made up of an array of light, but the one that impacts your circadian rhythm directly are the blue rays. These are strongest in the morning, which is why getting sunlight right when you wake up can help you feel invigorated and energized. These rays lower as the sun sets, allowing your brain to release melatonin and prepare for sleep. Unfortunately, many of the devices in modern-day life, such as televisions, computers, and phones, also have blue light in them. Using blue light glasses at night or avoiding screens for at least one hour before going to bed can help reduce the effect blue light has on your brain and help you fall asleep faster.

4- Eat healthy food

Food plays a crucial role in how well you sleep. A diet consisting of high fiber and low sugar helps you fall asleep faster and can increase the amount of deep, slow-wave sleep you get each night. Sugar and caffeine can not just keep you awake but wake you up throughout the night as well. And because they stay in your system for several hours, you want to avoid them at least eight hours before going to bed. Spicy foods can lead to heartburn or acid reflux, so minimizing those before bed will lead to better quality sleep as well. And foods rich in magnesium and vitamin B boost and balance your melatonin levels, the neurochemical vital to healthy sleep.

5- Create a sleep-friendly environment

Paying attention to where you sleep is an important step in getting quality sleep every night. You get your best sleep in rooms that are cool, dark, quiet, and have minimal clutter in them. If you live near bright street lights, using blackout curtains or a sleep mask can help keep the light out. Earbuds or earplugs designed for sleep can help minimize noise. Ideally, minimize screen time by avoiding watching television or scrolling social media in bed. But a healthy sleep environment also extends to making sure you have a comfortable and supportive mattress, bedding, and pillows. And you want to only use your bed and bedroom for sleep, keeping work or other daytime activities in other areas of your home whenever possible.

6- Meditate

Meditation has significant health benefits, one of which is healthier sleep. Studies in biopsychology, the study of behavior on the brain, has shown that meditation can reduce insomnia by reducing and managing extreme emotions like anger, anxiety, stress, and depression. Meditating before bed can help your body and mind relax so you can fall asleep faster and experience deeper sleep. And meditating during the day can help keep your sleep cycles on track. If you’re feeling tired or fatigued, ten minutes of meditation is equivalent to roughly forty minutes of sleep, so meditating instead of napping can give you the energy boost you need without disrupting your sleep-wake cycle.

7- Know when to nap

Naps can be a secret weapon to daytime productivity but there’s a trick to napping without sacrificing your sleep cycle. First, aim for naps that are ten to twenty minutes long, never going over thirty minutes if you can help it. Second, don’t sleep past 3 pm so that you aren’t disrupting your natural sleep rhythms. Drinking a small cup of coffee before starting your nap can also help you wake up within the allotted time, as caffeine takes roughly twenty to thirty minutes to take effect.

8- Read a Book

One habit that can help develop healthy sleep and reduce screen time before bed is reading a book. In 2009, University of Sussex researchers found that reading a book for at least six minutes before bed lowered stress by 68%. Reading fiction has been found to be as relaxing as meditation, in that it takes your mind out of your worries and allows you to fall into different thought patterns. By clearing your minds, you ease into a relaxed state that helps you fall asleep. Keep in mind, while some e-readers are designed to have low levels of blue light, tablets or phones won’t have the same effect. Actual books are ideal.

Conclusion

Making small changes to your daily routines can make a world of difference when it comes to healthy sleep. If you implement healthy sleep habits and still find yourself struggling, we always recommend seeing a medical professional. Getting quality sleep is one of the most important facets to ensuring your body and mind perform at optimal levels, unlocking your limitless potential.

For more on how to develop better sleep habits, watch this video:

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