Exercises that help stimulate and strengthen the mind, according to a memory champion’s method

Have you ever imagined stimulating your mental and memory skills while having fun? A Japanese book guarantees that it is not only possible, but also necessary, to keep the brain sharp. After all, our minds also need exercise, just like our muscles. To achieve this goal, the book proposes an effective method.

In this post, the awesome.club tells more about the technique and suggests some exercises so you can start stimulating your mind right now.

Yoshihiro Ikeda, world memory champion, gathered, in a kind of manual, a series of exercises that help to stimulate and strengthen the mind. And what is the secret of the Ikeda method? The fun. The author explains the difference between the way a child learns and memorizes things and the way adults do.

“There are many things that arouse interest in children and they express emotion in the face of what attracts them. These emotions open the door to the hippocampus, the entrance to memory, and are recorded,” says Ikeda. According to him, adults take more time to be truly interested in something. Thus, what we should do is have fun and stimulate our interest: “When something impacts our brain, it becomes easier to remember and learn”, points out the author.

Ikeda points out that we need to focus on that positive feeling that invades us when we understand or discover something, or even when we have an idea that seems brilliant. He calls this feeling “inspiration”. For it to be activated, there are five different sensors. But, before identifying them, the author establishes some very important rules for carrying out the exercises:

Have fun, yes. stress, no: remember that the most important thing is to have fun. Don’t rush or set time limits, just stay focused.

There is no order: One sensor is not more important than the other. So it doesn’t matter if you decide to do just one exercise for a certain sensor today. As long as you do all the exercises, at your own pace, and establish your own order, everything will be fine.

It is important to highlight that schedules are important: the author recommends performing the practices when the brain is most active. This can happen from the moment you wake up until 10 am, 4 pm or even 7 pm. Check out the exercises for each sensor below.

The brain is able to remember thanks to the emotions provoked by certain situations, such as finding something that was hidden. So, to activate this sensor, practice exercises that require locating hidden details in an image — those we can’t find with a quick glance.

The brain can categorize elements that have something in common. This happens with the aim of ordering and storing the information, facilitating the task of accessing it later. Therefore, the exercises indicated to activate the sensor in question are those in which we must classify and separate items by groups.

One of our brain’s skills is to reuse information already stored and previously known about a certain thing or situation – something useful for greater efficiency in the memorization process. Thus, the exercises indicated for this sensor are those involving words whose letters, when changed in order, gain a totally different meaning. Another good idea is the challenges that give clues so you can decipher a message.

Vision and the senses, in general, are great allies when it comes to memorizing. The ability to associate images with something or someone can also be exercised and stimulated. For that purpose, exercises that require memorizing an image and then reproducing it work perfectly.

This sensor brings prior information to mind, relating it to something that is in front of us. That is, it connects both previous and current information. Exercises that mix symbols, words and images, so that they are gathered and used in the creation of something, with the purpose of memorizing certain data, are perfect for activating this sensor.

From what you know about yourself, which of the sensors mentioned above is the most developed in your case? Comment!