Keeping your mind sharp is very important. As we all know if we don’t use it you lose it!

The 2 major reasons I play online brain games are to help enhance my creativity and improve my cognitive performance. This is done through the challenging problem solving, complex puzzles and games that generate a neurological response. The neurological response stimulates new sources of creativity. This new creativity can help you in all kinds of ways.

• Solve problems quicker and faster or in a better way
• See things differently
• Process information quicker
• Optimized ability to learn, reason, remember, plan and adapt

If you already have daily success rituals or success habits you do throughout your day just add this to your morning ritual or fit it in where possible. All it takes is 15 minutes or less a day.

Lumosity has over 30 online brain games you can play. Their my favorite brain training site because they have a great interface and site that provides you with a lot of education and assessments besides the games. I appreciate the structure in how they have it set up. First you start with Basic Training which has 40 sessions. In each session their are 5 brain games. Their designed so you just do 1 session a day. When you get done with all 40 sessions you can keep going on to other courses that range from 20 sessions to 60 sessions.

I find playing the brain games on Lumosity are a good change from just doing Sudoku, and Chess.

If you want to get 25% off on signing up, after your 7 day free trial is over they send you an email with a promo code you can enter.

In addition to playing online brain games you can try doing things different in your daily life to stimulate your brain.

• Brush your teeth with the opposite hand
• Drive a different way to work and back home
• Read with one eye closed and one eye shut for 5 min. then switch
• Take up a new hobby or learn something new like juggling, learn how to write
• Learn a foreign language
• Drawing or painting if your artistic

Doing random things differently all the time keeps your brain active and expands your neural systems, which makes them more communicative. In other words, you can alter the physical makeup of your brain by learning new skills. The important thing to realize is that these are cognitive changes and not conative changes.

The 5 Cognitive Areas of Lumosity

1. Speed

2. Memory

3. Attention

4. Flexibility

5. Problem Solving

3 Parts of the Mind

Cognitive – thinking, reasoning, and skills. This is what Lumosity helps with.

Conative – these are our talents, instincts and strengths or DNA. Our strongest synaptic connections in the brain that dominate our decision making capabilities.

Affective – feeling, desires, motivation, attitudes, emotions and values.

4 Ways to Enhance Your Creativity

Roger Epstein, creator of Generativity Theory, and world leading expert on creativity, states that there are 4 core competencies for creative expression.

1. Capturing – any time you get a new idea, capture it and don’t sensor your ideas. You can carry a note pad and pen, use your i-phone with the voice recorder, or any other strategy that fits you. The point is to capture it.

2. Surrounding – has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. Environments like your car, house and office. Do you have pictures on the wall, a messy desk, pictures on your screen-saver, the music you listen to, plants, vision boards, how your area is organized are a few things.

Changing your surrounding by taking vacations or having a second home or doing something out of the ordinary really helps with sparking your creativity. Taking breaks at work and at home for 30 minutes also does the trick. Go for a walk in the park or a hike in the woods. Just do something different. Get in your car and go to a coffee shop or do something that stimulates you.

The people you socialize with also affect your creativity. Being around negative people who aren’t open to new things or are restrained in terms of creativity isn’t a good thing and you should look to eliminate time around these people as much as possible.

3. Challenging – this is what Lumosity helps with. This refers to giving ourselves tough problems to solve. This can be through challenging puzzles or games that generate a neurological response. When we work on difficult problems, several different psychological behaviors compete with one another. This results in formation of new neural interconnections within your brain to solve the problem which helps you to enhance your creativity.

4. Broadening – if you develop a daily habit or ritual of reading or researching a new topic learning something of interest to you, it will broaden the creative capacity of your mind. Lets say your interested in creating a great life. As you read more books on how to do this things will start to spring up that come out of nowhere. The more you expand your awareness of knowledge and topics the more neural interconnections are formed in your mind.

After playing the online brain games on Lumosity for 10 days I have some good scores.

Lost in Migration – 3,825

Speed Match, 7,640

Word Bubbles – 1,050 – ( Not all that great)

These will definitely be going up the more I play. I think my favorite game is Penguin Pursuit.

See if you can beat my scores. If you do let me know in the comments sections. We can get a friendly competition going on this.

You’ve most likely seen or heard about the new Amazon Kindle that allows you to read books electronically…

I think this is a stupid product and heres why…

Some products we want the physical versions of and some we don’t!

Records, A Tracks, Tapes and CDs

Back in the day, wayyyy back…. there use to be records and A Tracks.

These things were humungous. An obvious thing we don’t want because they take up too much space.

Tapes sucked because you had to rewind and fast forward them and sometimes the tape in the casette would get all messed up.

CDs made more sense than tapes because you could skip ahead quickly but took up roughly same space as a tape. The only thing really bad about cd’s was that they could get scratched and the fact you had to tote them around everywhere in your CD Holder.

The obvious choice for music is an iPod with digital music. It makes sense. Its a simple little device and can hold all the music we’d ever want for 3 lifetimes. Is there any way for consumers to have a better way of consuming and storing their music…? I don’t really think so at this point.

Maybe having a chip installed inside our head or something but that would be too weird. Onward…

VHS Tapes and DVDs

In movies we went from BIG reels with a projection screen to BIG tapes you put in a VCR, then to DVDs, and finally to movies streamed over the internet via Netflix and iTunes.

I’ve only ever bought one DVD in my life. That movie was Snatch. A pretty good movie. After I bought it guess how many times I watched it. 4 times I would say… I think I paid $20 for the DVD. If I wanted to rent that movie 4 times on iTunes it would have been cheaper.

It would have cost me less and I wouldn’t have to tote it around or find a space for it. Guess what I did… I gave it to my brother. He has something like 100 DVDs he’s bought and now he never watches them. Maybe sometimes he’ll dig in his collection and watch one but its rare.

Its kinda funny. Once you have DVDs and its a fairly big collection, if you have to move, you have to find a box, put them in the box and then unpack the box when your moving in to your new place. Put all the DVDs in your movie stand and watch them sit in the stand like pictures or something.

My brother has moved a couple times. The first two times he was excited to get his DVDs up by the entertainment stand. After awhile this process gets old and you stop putting up the movies and they just sit until your ready to either throw them out, keep maybe a few, or sell the rest.

To me, minimalism makes more sense for DVDs and CDs. I prefer iTunes, Redbox or Netflix. Rent something when you want to see it and send it back when your done. That way its not sitting around somewhere taking up space.

Books and The Amazon Kindle

Books are the only thing I would have in a physical version. Heres why…

I circle page numbers of the book, underline certain things on each page and write notes in the back of the book so I can recall it easier so I don’t forget it. I like turning the pages. I like not having to look at another electronic or digital screen. Even though they say it doesn’t have any glare. Which is probably why it doesn’t have anything in color and is in grayscale (or does it)?

I know if I keep the book I bought 20 years ago or 50 years ago it will still be the same exact version I have now. It won’t change. Who’s to say you download something on the Kindle and the book is still the same or even still in your Kindle.

Yes books are a lot heavier and harder to tote around than CDs and DVDs, but physical book are still my preference.

In those rare cases, since a Kindle is an electronic device someone might steal that before they would steal any books.

Another reason is that just like Netflix and iTunes, when I’m in the mood to purchase a song or rent a movie you pay a measly little fee. Anytime I want to buy a book I go to Amazon and buy 2-3 books for a measly little fee. But buying a Kindle or Kindle DX is a slightly bigger decision since its two version cost $259 and $489.

My method for reading books is this. I buy physical versions of the book and listen to audio book downloads. If the audio book version is really good I’ll buy the physical book.

If I’m traveling I’ll just bring my iPod and listen to an audio book version. Why… the iPod is very small and light and I may never even open a book up, too many things to do! If its long term travel longer than 2 weeks though, I would bring a book along.

I might change my mind if Amazon made some simple changes to the Kindle but I doubt it….

So what’s your take…? Do you like the Amazon Kindle. Do you think it has a place in the book world… or do you think it will vanish because more people like the physical version of a book. Let me know by writing a comment below.

Related posts:

1. Audio Book Downloads – A Review of the Best Audio Book Websites