5 Brain Foods to Keep You Thinking Smart!

With all of the stressors that college students face, it’s easy to rely on comfort food as a coping mechanism to stave off the cravings that can often arise when stress levels are high. However, several surprising foods that are both tasty and nutritious can go a long way in improving your overall brain functioning as well as supplying you with valuable nutrients. The following are some to consider in boosting your brain power:

• Wild Salmon – an ideal source of Essential Fatty Acids which helps in boosting your mood, memory, synaptic networks as well as lower your risk for Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

• Cacao Beans – With a reputation to elevate mood, cacao beans are known to improve cognitive functioning and serve as a powerful antioxidant due to the effects of the chemical Theobromine. If you choose to get your chocolate from a candy bar, it is best to look for a high percentage of dark, unprocessed chocolate in the range of 75-100% cacao and avoid heavily processed chocolate.

• Matcha – Stone ground green tea powder of the utmost quality is know to have calming, yet stimulating effects on the brain and has been known to help monks stay focused when participating in 12-hour meditation lessons. The amino acid, L-Theanine is the chemical responsible for Matcha’s long term focusing effects.

• Blueberries – The bilberry extract in blueberries are good for eye function in the long term as you well know and this is pertinent to all of the extensive reading that students have to do.

• Coffee beans – Known to decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s and Dementia, coffee is one of the most powerful antioxidants out there and is known to enhance cognitive functioning on long term tasks. However, if you have a heart or medical condition that requires you to avoid it, you may want to substitute Roobios Tea, a tea that originated in South Africa that has been proven to reduce the effects of aging on the brain.

For more information on this topic, visit the following link:
http://www.brainready.com/

Tips for Remembering

Do you have trouble remembering people’s names after you meet them?  Are you wondering how in the world you are going to remember all of the biology terms for your upcoming test?  By using some simple techniques you can help improve your memory.  Here are some tricks:

1.    Learn to understand the information you must remember.  Understanding the information will allow you to recall the information easily. 

2.    Form associations: between the information you must remember and an object, body part, place, or emotion. 

3.    Recite or rewrite the information you must remember several times.

4.    If you must remember a large body of information, try to break the information into smaller pieces.  Then work on remembering the information in each category separately.

5.    Mentally organize the information you must remember.  It is easier to remember information that is organized than to remember information that seems to be scattered all over the place.

6.    Try to bring a personal touch to the information you must remember.  Relating the information to something about you will make it easier to remember.

7.    Form a mental image of what you need to remember.  Pictures are powerful tools for remembering. 

8.    Apply what you need to remember. For example, if you are trying to remember the meanings of new vocabulary words, use the words when you speak or write. 

9.    Test yourself.  By creating sample tests for yourself or creating flash card. 

10. Try to make remembering a fun activity by creating games using the information you must remember.

These tips were barrowed from How-to-study.com. 

Overcoming Concentration Barriers

When you get up to your ears in term papers, projects and tests, as you juggle your myriad of other daily responsibilties, those long hours of studying and preparing for exams can sometimes lead to burnout and concentration problems. Below are some strategies to help you maintain focus and concentration during these difficult moments of "studier's block".

• Preview the material and find areas where you might have further questions to maintain your interest in what you are studying. Writing some questions down that you can come back and answer once you have completed your reading or review will be especially useful.

• Set daily study goals. For example, rather than set a goal to study a particular subject, put your mind to creating a specific objective such as reading 12 pages of your English text and answering the first three review questions. That way, you will have a clearer picture that you have accomplished something.

• Vary your study activities by alternating between outlining, reciting the concepts, then taking notes. Using multiple ways to reinforce your learning will increase your likelihood of remembering concepts and will go a long way in preventing burnout. This will also address different styles of learning and exercise brain regions that you don’t normally use. For instance, saying concepts into a tape recorder is more likely to stimulate your auditory regions while outlining will keep your visual learning receptors active.

• Interrupt the tendency to daydream. The more aware you are of this tendency, the more likely you are to get past it. At the moment you start to daydream, set your intention to force trivial and irrelevant thoughts from your mind and restore your focus by quickly reviewing what you have read. Another strategy is to get up and walk around; distance yourself from your study materials; by standing up, you can redirect your thinking to the task you are working on. Practicing your control of daydreaming is a good habit to get into as this is one of the strongest barriers to keeping on task.

• Apply your learning. Relating concepts to aspects of your life and/or creating examples that apply to your life or people you interact with ensures that your learning becomes meaningful and real; this will increase your ability to recall the information more effectively.

• Schedule a regular interval of time in which to complete your work. For example, if you give yourself a deadline for which to complete your work within 2 hours, and at the end of that time period, you reward yourself, it will keep you motivated to complete the task in a timely and efficient manner. You could say, if I complete these readings from 6-8, at 8:00, I will meet a friend for tea.

• Pace yourself by chunking the information and taking short breaks in between. When you have a long and intensive paper or project, it is best to spread it out over the course of several days, rather than completing it all in one time segment.

• Organize your work by outlining the order in which you need to create the task and making it a point to preview the material first and create a summary and/or conclusion last. Previewing the material gives your mind the foundation for which to remember the concepts and organize how to break down the information into smaller steps.

For more information on this topic, visit this link.

Monday Fun Stuff: Cognifit

Many people either enjoy or think they ought to participate in games and activities designed to help themselves stay physically fit. It is quite easy to find an excercise program that can focus on a physical area like stretching, weight training, or aerobics that will build up one particular area you are weaker in.

It is more unusual to find an excercise program for the mind. While many people enjoy puzzle games like crosswords or logic puzzles that provide a refreshing mental workout, it is unusual to find a class on "improving your short term memory" or "dividing your attention with greater ease." This is the area in which Cognifit tries to step in and bridge the gap. This website has developed a series of activities which are designed to assess your mental fitness in at least 11 different categories: planning, shifting attention from one task to another, hand-eye coordination, short-term memory, working memory, speed of processing, visual scanning, visual perception, spatial perception, inhibition, and naming.

After completing the series of activities, Cognifit will recommend several games on its site that will help you become more capable in the areas you are weaker in. I found the activities fairly enjoyable, and look forward to trying out the games it recommended for me. Let me know what you think of the site!