Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Read Free Book Online

system. Keep an eye out for the powerful PFC!

    TAKE-AWAYS: BRAIN PLASTICITY
    •  The brain is made up of only two kinds of cells: neurons (brain cells) and glia (supporting cells).
    •  Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to change in response to the environment. Raising rats in enriched environments results in a thicker cortex, more blood vessels, and higher levels of certain neurotransmitters and growth factors.
    •  Training as a London taxicab driver results in brain plasticity. Cab driver recruits who studied and passed the difficult qualifying examination had larger posterior hippocampi, a structure known to be involved in spatial memory, than those who did not pass the exam.
    •  Areas of the brain recruited when you lean a second language include the inferior frontal gyrus on the left side and parts of the parietal lobe on the left side. Language in general is controlled by the left side of the brain.
    •  Music activates the parts of the brain involved in reward, motivation, emotion, and arousal, which include the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and midbrain.
    •  The prefrontal cortex is the command center of the evolved human brain and supervises all executive functions.
    •  Enriching your olfactory environment with lots of different smells stimulates the growth of new brain cells in the olfactory bulb, a key part of the brain responsible for our sense of smell.

    BRAIN HACKS: HOW DO I ENRICH MY BRAIN?
    You may not have time to go live in Disney World or France for the next few months, but the great news is that you can start to enrich your brain with these Brain Hacks, most of which take no more than four minutes per day.
    •   Motor cortex Brain Hack: Go online and teach yourself a new dance move from the So You Think You Can Dance website and then practice it for four minutes to your favorite music.
    •   Taste cortex Brain Hack: Try a cuisine that you have never tried before: Laotian, African, Croatian, and Turkish come to mind. Be adventurous! And here is another taste cortex Brain Hack for extra credit: Try eating a meal in complete darkness and see how the lack of visual input affects your sense of taste. It should change your experience of the meal and allow a pure taste sensation to come through.
    •   Cognitive Brain Hack: There are so many fun possibilities to enrich your brain. Here are just a few: Watch a TED talk on a topic you know nothing about. Listen to a story from the Moth Radio Hour , a storytelling program with a wide range of topics. Listen to a popular podcast that you have never listened to before. Read a story from the section of the newspaper that you never read—for me it would be finance or sports.
    •   Visual cortex Brain Hack: The next time you go to a museum, pick a piece of artwork that you are not familiar with and just sit quietly and get lost visually in it for at least four minutes. In reality, it could take hours to really explore a new piece fully; you can get a great start, though, in just four minutes. A hack for this hack is to simply find a new piece of art online and explore it visually on your computer. Both will stimulate your visual cortex.
    •   Auditory cortex Brain Hack: Go to iTunes, the YouTube music channel, Pandora, Spotify, or whatever music site you like and listen to a really popular song from a genre of music you never listen to or in a different language. Try to understand why it might be number one for that genre.
    •   Olfactory Brain Hack: The main difference between regular sommeliers (who can differentiate many different scents and describe them so precisely) and you or me is one thing: practice. Take just a few minutes to sit and smell your most odorous meal of the day. It might be breakfast with a rich, aromatic cup of coffee and the deep comforting smell of toast fresh from the toaster, or it might be your dinner of chicken tikka masala from your