Mentalrobics®
Stay mentally fit with these daily brain exercises. You will learn how to flex your mind, improve your creativity and boost your memory. Pick your favorite exercises from our daily suggestions and repeat them as desired to enhance your mental capacity. Try to do some Mentalrobics every single day!
Daily exercises and tips for improving memory, creativity, vocabulary and stress management.
When you are trying to memorize something, flash cards can be a very effective way to improve your memory.
This vocabulary test is loaded with over 3000 of the most common words found on the SAT and GRE standardized tests.
Mentalrobics Articles
Word of the Day : Impugned
im-pugn
verb :: Challenged to be doubted.
"The presidential candidated tried to impugn his opponent's record."
Smarter Children's Brains Develop Later
After analyzing brain scans of hundreds of children over almost two decades, researchers have found that the brains of smarter children develop later in life than the brains of children with average intelligence.
In all children, the Cerebral Cortex grows thicker to a certain point and then thins out during the next few years. In children with average intelligence this thinning out starts at around age 7. In children with above average intelligence, the thinning out doesn't start until as late as age 13.
It is still unclear what factors, besides genes, may contribute to this difference, but environmental factors have not been ruled out.
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Anxiety
Many people use the words 'anxiety' and 'stress' interchangeably, and although they are related, they do not mean the same thing. Anxiety is a feeling of fear or apprehension about future uncertainties, which may contain unknown dangers. Anxiety can cause sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath or trembling.
Stress is a larger term that includes anxiety as well as feelings of frustration, anger or nervousness. Stress and anxiety are highly personal things. What makes one person feel stressed or anxious may not make someone else feel the same way.
Anxiety disorders are strong cases that have a serious negative impact on a person's life. Some common anxiety disorders are phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety disorder. For many of these conditions there are drugs or treatments that are effective.
Ego and Superego
According to Freud, the mind is made up of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is concerned with satisfying our needs, the ego is aware of the self and the world, and the superego is concerned with morality.
Creative ideas originate in the unconscious id and must be filtered through the ego and superego before they can be expressed to the world. The ego may reject an idea because it is unrealistic or impractical and the superego may reject an idea because it is against our ethics.
For example, an idea to genetically engineer a purple cat might be rejected by the ego for being impossible. The idea to throw a cat into a vat of purple paint would be rejected by the superego for being cruel.
Very few creative ideas will get past an overly restrictive ego and superego. At the same time, an excessively passive ego or superego will result in the expression of many impractical or immoral ideas. Through exercises such as brainstorming, we can train our ego and superego to be more or less selective depending upon our needs.
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