In its normal state a healthy human brain is constantly active. It’s constantly busy monitoring, adjusting and repairing the body in order to make it function with optimum efficiency. Out of all that activity arises the mind which is also perpetually busy and active in associating, sensing, perceiving, retrieving and storing data in order to keep you alive and well in a competitive and challenging society.
This constant mental activity is one of the biggest obstacles to good focus and concentration.
It can be very difficult to focus and concentrate when thoughts and emotions are always interfering with our attention. But this is the normal way by which the brain and mind work.
If you don't know it by now the brain works and behaves much like a muscle. So to train it you exercise it like you would a regular muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
To most people the brain does not feel as if it's a muscle, it's just an organ in the head that stores memories and enables thinking. But I assure you that with proper guidance and training you will soon discover that it behaves very much like a muscle. As you start to exercise it you will start to feel it. You discover that you can do more things with your brain and mind than you ever thought was possible.
Craig Ramey of the University of Alabama says that the brain and education are almost synonymous. Children need to rehearse in order to learn new skills. Without practice, new skills are lost. If you don't use it you lose it; this is as true for cognitive skills as it is for muscles.
Brain cells, like muscles, need exercise in the form of education or other stimulating experiences to stay healthy. Researchers have found that the brain's great capacity to physically change and become more powerful with experience - once thought to be limited to childhood - remains throughout life.
Mental exercise, scientists are finding, causes physical changes in the brain, strengthening connections between brain cells called synapses and actually building new connections. Such physical changes can occur within seconds, as when we shift attention, or they may take hours or days, as some memories are cast into the biological ingots that last a lifetime.
Research indicates that certain exercises can build up specific brain areas, and some scientists are setting up programs to use this new knowledge to help learning-disabled children.
The mental patterns you use the most during your lifetime get more and more ingrained, habitual and fixed as you get older. In the terms of brain and mind activity, you become more of the same.
When you use your mind rigorously, the brain grows new dendrites. These are the thin branch-like structures that stimulate and carry information between brain cells. If you work hard on solving logical problems, language and math, you grow dendrites in your left-brain and it gets more connected and becomes more powerful. If you work on solving abstract problems, spatial and emotional you develop your right brain and it grows to become more powerful. If you work hard on solving future related problems, multitasking, planning ahead, prospective memory, meta-cognitive tasks you develop your frontal lobes.
To exercise your body you go to the gym where you have specially made equipment to exercise and train specific muscles. The same goes for your brain. To exercise your brain you use "mental weights" to exercise and train the specific mental muscles you want to develop and make stronger.
Gardar Gardarsson PNLP has been teaching techniques to boost mental focus and improve concentration for over 20 years. He has tought thousands of people simple but powerful techniques to maximize their mental perfomance.