Boost your brain power

hit the gym
What's good for the body is good for the brain. "Physical activity results in increased blood flow to the brain and fewer declines in cognitive processing," says Cheryl Grady, a psychiatry and psychology professor at the University of Toronto and senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "There's even some evidence that exercise leads to neurogenesis - the creation of new brain cells." For an extra boost to your brain power, try workouts that require balance or hand-eye coordination, such as racquet sports. And keep at it: A German study found that grey matter (which makes up the parts of the brain associated with advanced mental activity) increased in participants who were trained to juggle, but after three months without practice, the grey matter reverted back to its original size.

learn something new
Challenge yourself by learning a new language, taking up a new instrument or pursuing a hobby. Learning causes our brain to make new connections, says Grady. Research shows that introducing your brain to new concepts and skills increases levels of dopamine, a hormone related to learning. "We're finding out now that our brains aren't as hard-wired as we once thought," says Grady, "so even if you've been lying on the couch watching TV for the past five years, your brain will adapt remarkably quickly if you challenge it." Experts believe that once a skill becomes routine, it's less beneficial, so make sure to try a variety of activities and increase the difficulty level regularly.

make friends
Close relationships help squelch stress, which has been pinpointed as one of the primary causes of brain-cell decline. Studies have shown that seniors with the strongest social networks are more likely to stay sharp. Moreover, socializing requires that you engage many brain functions at once, including memory, attention and control, says Alvaro Fernandez, co-founder of sharpbrains.com - a website that focuses on the latest brain-fitness research.

drill yourself
Try a variety of mental functions with games like Nintendo's Brain Age or lumosity.com. "While we don't have a lot of empirical evidence yet about how beneficial these games are, we do know that people can be trained to improve at specific memory tasks," says Grady. There are also many basic exercises you can try anywhere - test your brainpower with the ones below from sharpbrains.com.

a) With a pen and paper, try to draw an everyday object (like a coin) from memory. "This shows how selective our attention is," says Fernandez. "We often don't remember things simply because we didn't really pay attention to them to begin with."

b) Say the months of the year backwards in reverse alphabetical order. Or, play with numbers: Find the sum of today's date (for example, 23/11/2008), find the sum of your date of birth and subtract the two totals. These exercises test your working memory - your ability to manipulate units of information in your mind, says Fernandez.

© 2009 Rogers Publishing Limited All rights reserved.