The cognitive functions of the brain need daily exercise to perform at their optimal level when we need them in our professional and personal lives.
Under stress?
It’s a day like any other for Gabriel. At a few minutes to eight o’clock he stops the car in front of the school where his two children, Miruna and Alex, go to school.
As he watches his children walk through the school gates, his thoughts are already flying, at the speed of a supersonic aeroplane, to what awaits him on the day ahead.
Getting into the car with a long sigh, he switches on the navigation system, only to realise that nothing is different from yesterday, and the journey from Dristor to Militari is still 68 minutes, and the thought that he would have been better off with his office in Giurgiu comes to his mind again.
A few starting manoeuvres and our character is in the capital’s traffic, along with the thoughts that begin to invade him and the anxiety that a third of the planet’s population feels, in one form or another.
From the intersection of Sebastian Street and Calea 13 Septembrie, the phone starts ringing. A colleague has forgotten whether he was supposed to prepare a presentation for the 11 o’clock meeting or whether another member of the team is in charge of the visual side of the exhibition.
Ce what is it with these people? Why do they forget such simple things? Just the day before yesterday he had had an email discussion in which he had established the responsibilities of each team member. If anyone had forgotten, they could have simply checked the email, but apparently that had been forgotten as well
Just a few minutes after nine o’clock and the car was parked in the company’s courtyard, Gabriel hurried up to his office to check his diary and incoming messages
It’s shaping up to be a busy day, in which, in addition to the quarterly reporting meeting, he will have to talk to two of his subordinates because they have a personal conflict, and he has to finalise the calculations for next year’s budget, a year he doesn’t know how complicated it will be in terms of the evolution of the COVID19 pandemic.
So, in just one day, he will be using his language skills, problem-solving ability, critical thinking, memory, attention and concentration.
Since when did life become so complicated? What should a 21st century person do to stay balanced and productive at the same time?
Meditation and Mindfulness
Balance and productivity cannot be achieved by simply wishing upon the goldfish. It takes conscious effort for development and allocating time in your daily schedule for training.
There have been numerous studies to provide scientific proof of how meditation and mindfulness influence the brain, its structure and the processes it coordinates.
An article published on 12 October 2017 by the AdevărulOnline edition stated that “Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have found that different types of mental training, such as meditation or mindfulness practice, alter certain areas of the brain and can have effects on either attention or social stress.
Meditation is beneficial for our well-being. This practice has been supported by scientific studies that focus on mindfulness. However, the words ‘mindfulness’ and ‘meditation’ denote a variety of mental training techniques aimed at cultivating different skills.
Cu other words, despite the growing interest in meditation research, it is not clear which type of mental practice is particularly useful for improving either mindfulness or social skills such as compassion and perspective-taking. Other questions are, for example, whether such practices can induce structural brain plasticity and alter the brain networks that underlie the processing of these skills, and which training methods are most effective in reducing social stress. To answer these questions, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, have carried out the ‘ReSource’ project, which aims to identify the unique effects of different mental training methods on the brain, body and social behaviour.
“Depending on which mental training technique was practised over a three-month period, specific brain structures and related behavioural markers changed significantly in participants. For example, after mindfulness-based attention training for three months, we observed changes in the cortex in areas previously shown to be related to attention and decision-making functions. At the same time, mindfulness increased on tasks measuring the decisional aspects of attention, while measures of compassion or perspective did not significantly increase. These social skills were only affected in participants in the other two modules,” says Sofie Valk, in the journal Science Advances, cited by Science Daily.”
Practice! Practice!
Brain training is effective when it is done consistently, in a co-ordinated way, according to a plan to develop certain skills. Numerous studies have been conducted to test this hypothesis.
So far, COGITO is the largest and probably the most convincing study in the field of brain training.101 young adults aged 20-31 and 103 people aged 65-80 trained for one hour every 2-3 days, for a total of 100 sessions. A single training session included 12 exercises: 6 for comprehension and speed, 3 for working memory, and 3 for information recall. The brain-training exercises were adjusted at the start of the study to match the participants’ performance, as shown by pre-testing.
The study was designed to test whether the improvements seen in the cognitive areas trained had an effect on other cognitive skills and to see whether age influences these improvements.
In addition, the researchers wanted to assess whether the progress in brain training is transferable to everyday life.
Significant improvements were seen in cognitive skills – particularly working memory. We need working memory to understand complex subjects, solve problems and store new information. All participants, regardless of age or gender, showed improvements in working memory following the training. The researchers believe that the training strengthened the neural connections between the two frontal lobes of the brain, which led to improved working memory for both younger and older participants.