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.
