Neurobics: Brain Exercises on the Job

Just as cross-training helps you maintain physical fitness, using your brain in a variety of ways can help you keep your mental fitness, strength and flexibility strong.

"Presenting the brain with non-routine or unexpected experiences using combinations of your physical senses -- vision, smell, touch, taste and hearing -- keeps your thinking and perception active and growing," says Lawrence C. Katz, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical School in Durham, NC, and coauthor of Keep Your Brain Alive. "It stimulates patterns of neural activity that create more connections between different brain areas and causes nerve cells to produce additional brain nutrients."

Dr. Katz calls these brain-stimulating exercises "neurobics." "Just like aerobic exercises emphasize different muscle groups to enhance coordination and flexibility, neurobic exercises involve activating many different brain areas to increase the range of mental motion," he says. "They result in a mind that's fit to meet various challenges -- whether it's remembering a name, mastering a new computer program or staying creative in your work."

Activities are neurobic if they:

• Involve one or more of your senses in a novel context. "By blunting the sense you normally use, you force yourself to rely on other senses to do an ordinary task," says Dr. Katz. For example: Try getting dressed for work with your eyes closed.

• Engage your attention. To stand out from everyday events and make your brain go into alert mode, an activity must be unusual, fun, surprising, engage your emotions or have meaning for you. For example: Turn the pictures on your desktop upside down.

• Do a routine activity in an unexpected, non-trivial way. For example: Take a completely new route to work.

Neurobics

The following are examples of neurobic exercises you can do at work. Tailor them to fit your particular workspace and responsibilities.

• Arbitrarily reposition everything on your desktop. From being exposed to it daily, your brain constructs a spatial "map" of your desktop so that very little mental effort is required to locate your computer mouse, telephone, stapler and other tools. "Scrambling the location of familiar objects you normally reach for without thinking re-activates spatial learning networks and gets your visual and brain areas to work, adjusting your internal maps," says Dr. Katz.

• Use your fingers to learn the Braille numbers for different floors of your office building or for controlling the elevator doors. "Learning to make distinctions and associations with your fingers -- such as between two and three dots -- activates a whole new set of pathways linking the cognitive regions of your cortex to the sensory regions," says Dr. Katz. Collect small objects -- paper clips, fasteners, nails or screws -- in a cup and, during a break or while on the phone, identify them strictly by touch.

• Try working with the hand you don't normally use for some familiar tasks, such as writing, stapling, turning on copy or fax machines, or dialing the telephone.

• Change where or with whom you eat lunch. If the weather permits, eating outside instead of inside will automatically increase your sensory stimulation.

• Turn your desk clock or an illustrated calendar upside down. "When you look at a familiar image right side up, your left brain quickly labels it and diverts your attention to other things," says Katz. "When the picture is upside down, the quick-labeling strategy doesn't work and your right-brain kicks in, trying to interpret the shapes, color and relationships of a puzzling picture."