Can you flex your brain

Physical exercise: Physical exercise is as important for your brain as it is for other parts of your body. Even simple exercises, such as a brisk walk, a bike ride, or basic yoga techniques, have been shown to help improve cognition.

Aerobic exercises such as these have been found to improve short- and long-term memory as well as processing speed, which is the speed we analyze information we receive from the world such as processing a visual signal, like a stop sign, into an appropriate response: pressing the brakes. Recent studies have shown beneficial effects of not only brain training programs available online, but also of games such as Sudoku and crosswords.

In the same way that muscles grow with the challenge of increasingly heavier weights, your brain needs to be adequately challenged to be properly exercised.

Diet: Eating healthy is as important for your brain as it is for the rest of your body. Whole diet approaches, such as the Mediterranean diet, appear to be beneficial in slowing cognitive decline.

Reviewed: May 1, Bonus: Your supermarket shopping trips will be much more efficient. Take a different route to work: This forces your brain to process new surroundings, making you more alert and committing new information — such as turns, street names and buildings — to memory.

Take notes by hand: At your next meeting, ditch the laptop and put old-fashioned pen to paper instead. The act of jotting down notes rather than typing them helps you retain the information more effectively. Go for a brisk walk: Plenty of research shows that physical activity has a positive effect on cognitive function, so dust off those sneakers and step outside. Leave the headphones at home and, instead, try to soak in the sights, sounds and smells of your surroundings during your walk; they all stimulate different parts of your brain.

The good news is that you can train your brain to remember just as well as you can train for body for a marathon. In fact, studies show that the brain needs steady stimulation to stay sharp, and a sedentary lifestyle can cause both physical and mental decline.

Exercise is one of the best things for the brain. When people sit for a long time, their brains get lazy. We think about training our bodies from the neck down, but we also need to train our bodies from the neck up.

Keep a scorecard on how you do and try to top your score each time.