7 ways to train your brain for higher education
Table of Contents
Fostering critical thinking in academia and beyond
Physically exercising your brain
History of the phrase “Train Your Brain”
Training your brain activities
Introduction
What you think affects how you perform. Training your brain is as important as training your body ~ Sports psychology consultant Gary Mack
Isn’t training your brain exactly what the world of higher education is all about? Whether you are a student, faculty, or administrator, don’t you want to increase your ability to discern what’s important from what is not? Or be confident in your assessment of information by considering the credibility of the source, the content, and the purpose of the author. I certainly want that ability for myself! With that in mind (pun intended), I plan to celebrate “Train Your Brain” Day on October 13th.
Making assumptions without fully understanding what I am reading or watching is a trap I have fallen into more times than I care to admit. To train your brain in higher education means learning to do critical thinking for yourself.
I define critical thinking as the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information in order to make well-informed decisions and solve complex problems. I believe in today’s world of misinformation, propaganda, hyperbole, and censorship, the critical thinking skills fostered in academia are of paramount importance. Critical thinking fosters distance and calm coolness from a topic. Speaking strictly for myself, I find such distance useful to keep me from blowing up or sinking into despair.
Why train your brain?
As I get older, I am losing some of my ability to quickly process large amounts of information, and I get more easily distracted. This is normal for human beings, and why machine learning (aka artificial intelligence) may ultimately be truly beneficial as we age. In the meantime, I need to hone my critical thinking skills and train my brain to process ideas more quickly so I don’t end up comatose from information overload.
Making a conscious effort to train your brain can generate greater creativity and resilience for problem-solving in a world desperately in need of creative solutions for large-scale issues. Speaking from personal experience, I know I can turn off the flow of information when I don’t agree with what is being said, whether politics, medicine, history, music, or any other number of subjects. Rather than shutting down, I’d rather increase my capacity for critical analysis.
Kelsey Russell, a 23-year-old graduate student in sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says Gen Z is yearning for media literacy skills, like contextual research and how to evaluate information. What an opportunity for higher education!
What is brain training?
Brain training may also be called cognitive training or mind training. This refers to a variety of activities designed to make people better at reasoning, problem-solving, and learning, as well as increasing the memory capacity of their brain. Many current cognitive training programs focus on increasing attention, working memory, and executive functions of the pre-frontal cortex to regulate thought and action.
The level of improvements achieved through brain training is debatable, and certainly, some of the promised solutions, especially in terms of staving off dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, are dubious at best. On the other hand, helping your brain work better and faster by regularly engaging in new activities as long as it requires some sort of cognitive stretch can aid in critical thinking.
Though it’s not clear who first coined the term “brain training” or who launched October 13th as “Train Your Brain Day,” it has been heavily promoted by firms selling cognitive training goods since the mid-2000s. In 2005, consumers in the US spent $2 million on cognitive training products; in 2007, they spent about $80 million. By 2012, “brain training” was a $1 billion industry, though there were mixed reports in the literature for the efficacy of these products.
Many researchers say the science does not support the brain training claims of companies like Luminosity, Cognifit, Cogmed, Posit Science, or Brain Age, all companies providing games, software, and other services to enhance cognitive abilities. In fact, Luminosity paid $2 million in January 2016 to settle an FTC deceptive advertising suit for claiming its program would sharpen brain performance in everyday life and protect against cognitive decline.
Fostering critical thinking in academia and beyond
Critical thinking versus criticism designed to shut down any conversation is incredibly important to higher education. Students should leave college with the tools to consider multiple perspectives, analyze complex information, and discern underlying components. Understanding, evaluating, and determining the credibility of a source in our misinformation age helps distinguish reliable from deliberately skewed information.
Without critical thinking skills, censorship easily takes root. The increasing number of books being banned across the US based on one sentence or one passage, without considering the whole and its purpose, is one reason to foster critical thinking for ourselves and our students. Especially if we are living in the proverbial echo chamber of like-minded people, comfortable though that may be.
Though it can be difficult to hear both sides, I try to. Sometimes, listening to someone else’s point of view makes me really mad, and sometimes, it makes me really sad, but I hope listening increases my compassion and empathy for people I don’t agree with. I am hoping, at some point, the ability to engage in informed discussions without rancor may return to our society. In the meantime, training our brains to discern the difference between manipulative propaganda and a well-reasoned argument may be the best we can do.
Critical thinking skills can also inspire a lifelong love of learning. A well-trained brain is more likely to seek out new knowledge and ideas, testing and analyzing for validity and usefulness. The world needs people using their brains to seek solutions to very large chaotic system challenges like climate change and economic insecurity, as well as better interpersonal relationships. Trained brains can better communicate the options and consequences of action or inaction.
Physically exercising your brain
Ironically, one of the best ways to exercise your brain and critical thinking skills is to physically exercise. If you think the brain is a muscle, you are not alone. The brain is an organ, nearly 60% fat, consuming as much as 30% of the available glucose in your body. Generally weighing about three pounds by adulthood, the only muscle tissue in your brain comes from the middle layer of arteries carrying blood to the brain.
Keeping the blood flowing is why you need physical exercise. Research has shown physical exercise can improve cognitive functioning, mood, and overall sense of well-being thanks to the release of hormones like dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. Keeping your brain healthy with physical exercise can also lower the risk of dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment. If you want to think clearly and well, take care of the body that houses your brain, and don’t wait until you are old to do it.
Feeding your brain well
Some of you will remember the old computer programming mantra: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In the world of complicated algorithms driving our interactions on social media, in classrooms, and for research of any kind, it’s still true. While good nutrition is literally important for good brain functioning, cognitively feeding your brain helps you think critically.
Feeding your brain means trying something challenging and new, requiring a few of those little gray cells to find some new neural pathways. A simple example could be trying to write or speak without using clichés. I find this extremely hard to do: the old phrases readily pop into my head and often seem to say exactly what I want to say. That’s how they became clichés in the first place.
For instance, “In a nutshell” perfectly summarizes the idea that there is a lot of information being conveyed in a short amount of time or if written, in a small amount of space. “To put it briefly” may be an alternative, but it’s not very interesting and certainly does not have the metaphoric power of a nutshell. A different idea might be finding new creative ways to curse. My daughters discovered the power of Shakespeare’s language for this: “Away, you starvelling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!” from Henry IV Part 1 (Act 2, Scene 4) tickled them for days when they were younger. Using your words and finding alternative phrases can be fun.
History of the phrase “Train Your Brain”
The term “train your brain” did not come into common parlance in the US until late in the 19th century. Even if those exact words were not used, the concept was certainly discussed in the Western Classical canon dating back to at least to Aristotle, who wrote about the relationship of mind to impulses and urges, trying to discern what drives human behavior and what a person should do to build a store of knowledge and become educated.
In the East, Verse 35 of Dhammapada from the 3rd century reads, “The mind is very hard to check and swift, it falls on what it wants. The training of the mind is good; a mind so tamed brings happiness.” The idea of training the brain is certainly embedded in these works.
In the US, the scholarly ideas around being able to cognitively train your brain goes back to at least the 1890s with the publication of two books by schoolteacher Catherine Aiken, Methods of Mind-Training: Concentrated Attention and Memory (1895) and Exercises in Mind-Training: In Quickness of Perception Concentrated Attention and Memory (1899).
Like many current cognitive practices, Miss Aiken’s system required her female pupils to spend about 15 minutes a day on short attention and memory activities, such as being able to immediately recognize the number of objects in a group and recall them in order at a later time. Miss Aiken disavowed any association with the spiritualists of her time seeking to promote “brain health” through hypnotism, seeing brain training as rigorous academic work.
At the end of the 19th century, another promoted source of brain training promoted material was the 1891 publication of The Ralston brain regime: Presenting a course of conduct, exercises, and study designed to develop perfect health in the physical brain, strengthen the mind and increase the power of thought: a book of practice, more than theory, by Everett Ralston. Exercises included positive thinking, mental visualization, and stopping your mind from wandering.
In the 20th century, the Pelman system was popular through the 1950s. The Pelman Institute in London devised a correspondence course to reduce “grasshopper mind,” forgetfulness, depression, phobia, and procrastination. The system promoted the ability to train your mind to remember 20-100 items in order.
In the early 21st century, there was another wave of interest in brain training. Companies capitalized on the public awareness around neuroscience and a growing recognition of the neuroplasticity of the brain. Brain Age, Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! launched in 2005. Considered “edutainment,” Brain Age was an enormously popular series of video games based on the work of neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, developed and published by Nintendo, with an updated version released in 2019.
Training your brain activities
There are plenty of fun activities to keep you from losing your mind, ahem, mental acuity. Though the research is mixed on whether doing crosswords or other word games stave off mental diseases like Alzheimer’s (probably not), memory games can help force you to organize or reorganize information, and that’s a brain training exercise worth doing. Even if the science doesn’t support the biggest claims around brain training, we humans still love the games associated with it. If you practice something, you tend to get better at it, and that is very satisfying. Here are 7 ideas to get you going:
1. Reading
In terms of critical thinking skills, reading is still one of the best things you can do to train your brain, especially if you have someone to talk about the material with after finishing. If you don’t have someone to talk to, you can still answer questions for yourself if a “Reader’s Guide” is provided. Reading material you don’t normally read is a great way to stretch your cognitive ability. I read a great deal of science fiction, which can bend your mind and perceptions of reality as I continue my quest for visions of a non-dystopian future.
2. Routines
Change your routine. Take a different route to class or home, or change what you eat for lunch. Simple changes like these can force your brain to do some problem-solving, one facet of critical thinking.
3. Screens
Turn off your screen time, or at least reduce the number of hours per day, especially if you are watching streaming shows for entertainment. You don’t have to give up this entertainment time completely, but reducing it will leave you more time to try something new. Brains hate a vacuum, so you will quickly figure out something else that is interesting to do.
4. Writing
Write something. Anything. It could be a free-form poem, a short story, a journal entry about your day, or random thoughts on an article you want to write. Of course, you can always work on an article or book you already have underway, but the object here is to do something different to engage your mind.
5. Vocabulary
I love etymology and looking up words I don’t know. Figuring out where they originated or how the meaning has shifted over time is fun for me. Try learning one new word each day for at least a month to train your brain by using a vocabulary app.
6. Puzzles
Work on any sort of puzzle: crosswords, brain teasers, word jumbles, brain teasers, or sudoku. You’ll get better and faster over time. I have found that my own addiction to crossword puzzles has honed my writing and helped me pick the exact word I want.
7. Classes
Take a class on something you know little to nothing about. It doesn’t have to be a big investment in time. There are plenty of 1-2 hour modules on nearly any topic you can think of, from photography to music to cooking to repairing old boats. Put your critical thinking skills to work and train your brain by learning what is important to know about your chosen topic.
Conclusion
Each of these activities can promote the ability of the brain to see and solve a problem more easily. That, in turn, can enhance critical thinking skills. Using brain training to encourage critical thinking is an exercise worth promoting in higher education.
If you need help to train your brain, contact Hillary for a 20-minute complementary session.
Tags: academia, academic, brain training, critical thinking
