Make Your Brain Work Better Part 2

 May 21, 2009

Interview with Richard Restak, M.D.author of Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance
______________

Mike Carruthers:
Perhaps one of the most important ways to make sure your brain keeps working well is to use it.

Richard Restak, M.D.:
What I call seeking "cognitively enhancing experiences" - people that you hang around, the things that you talk about, the things that you read about, constantly wanting to learn something new.

Dr. Richard Restak

 Dr. Richard Restak, author of the book Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance

And curiosity, prodding yourself to be curious about people and events and things like that and questioning.

Mentally challenging your brain simply makes it work better at any age and so does physical exercise.

Now we know that exercise actually increases the profusion of blood into the brain cells, it increases the circuitry (the functioning circuitry) and the smoothness of it. So all of this comes from exercise - you have to pick the exercise of course that you find the most appealing.

And here's something you probably didn't know; napping helps your brain.

Napping is a real surprise; it's been shown that napping (getting a twenty to thirty minute nap) is as effective as a whole night's sleep in terms of consolidation and enhancing memory - things like that. So napping is… a twenty minute nap is all you would need to improve your memory - as much as a whole night's sleep. We used to think of napping as sort of being a little bit lazy, "Oh we better be careful, he goes and takes a nap everyday" - well it's very important to do it and I highly suggest it and I find out during my interviews that highly creative people often take naps.

 To hear the complete unedited interview, click here