INTELLIGENCE RAISING EXERCISES

Before tackling any activity that you hope will increase your brain power, it is worth taking the time to relax a bit. Take a long, deep breath, and relax your shoulders. Make it a practice to breathe deeply throughout any brain power routine. Your brain makes use of the extra oxygenation, and the difference may surprise you!

Now that your blood cells are circulating better (you did breathe, didn't you?), let's go over some of the ways you can pump up your brain and increase access to your memory, complex thought processes, and mood. Consider your brain as a mass of wiring. The most dense areas of wiring are concentrated in the areas where you have had the most experience(s) and the most thought about your experience(s). What we're after here is triggering your brain wiring to branch off into new areas, increasing the connectivity of your brain overall, and stimulating growth in areas that have so far been, shall we say, "fallow."

You have to ask yourself this question: What kinds of life experiences have I had the least exposure to? This question is a little abstract, but think about it. For example, if you are a 40-something man in a white-collar work environment, you can think of the areas where you get the most brain exposure, or neural activity to be more precise. You probably have some training in management, or perhaps some kind of engineering. What activities are common to this work? Just go on a mental walk through your average workweek. Meetings with several other employees? Standing in line for coffee in the morning? A daily commute? These are some possible common experiences around which your brain has generated dense neural clusters. Could you do it in your sleep? - there's a hint that your brain doesn't have to work much to accomplish it. What we are looking for are the things you don't do, and yes, your brain has to reach to think them up. Hey! Guess what! That's the first moment of generating new neural activity, that reach, that attempt to answer an abstract question. So far, so good.

I'll help you down this road by suggesting some possible low-neural-load experiences. How about singing. Singing requires activity in a particular area of the brain and can enhance every kind of thought process. Or, if you are already a choir boy, how about basket weaving? Don't laugh, weaving requires complex mental processes. Now I've gotten your brain slinging a flashlight around some dark corners, you try it. Maybe there are some things you have actually been interested in for a long time, but have never really explored. This is great - you already have a little neural button to start growing around. Pick something that gives you at least a little jolt of interest. Enthusiasm is a great brain booster.

Now you're ready to start a whole new neural neighborhood. (Hey - squeeze your shoulders up to your ears while breathing deeply. We still want circulation here.) Take that neglected interest and jot down everything you can think of, related to it in any way. Be silly, add whatever comes to your mind. Look over your list, and choose something interesting to explore further. Start by doing a quick search online, and see where it takes you.

The act of reading this article and thinking about what you don't normally think about has already raised your intelligence. Aren't you the hot brainy one now!