What You Do Can Help Or Hurt Your Brain Part 2

April 28, 2010

Interview with Mark Fenske, author of the book The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success

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Mike Carruthers:
All the exciting new research on the human brain keeps showing that we have a lot of power over how well our brain performs.

Mark Fenske:
We’re finding that one of the easiest things that you can do to improve brain function overall is get regular exercise. 
 

Mark Fenske

Mark Fenske, author of the book The Winner's Brain, says we now know….

People like Art Kramer at the University of Illinois is doing work looking at things even in elderly people. People who are facing age-related declines in cognitive function in contrast to things like doing the crossword puzzle or doing some brainteasers. But where you may just get better at doing the teasers or crossword puzzles with physical exercise you see across the board improvement in cognitive functioning and emotional functioning too.

We all know that focusing your brain on a task is important, but it turns out you can focus too much.

And one of the interesting people that we talked to is a guy named Aaron Fechter who invented the Whack-A-Mole game. This game really illustrates one of the things that we’re finding in attention research and that’s in some tasks you can try too hard. And so if you go to the fair and see some kid who’s really trying is hardest he’s not going to do so well.

And the same is true for a lot of things in life.

For people who are trying to find things, “Where did I put my keys?” When they’re really trying too hard sometimes that can actually interfere with the task and in those situations it’s actually better to take a little bit of a relaxed approach. Try to take a wider focus that allows you to incorporate more information to do the task that you want to do.

 To hear the complete unedited interview, click here