Games Are Good For Brain : 10 Reasons To Play!!!

Games for the brain sound like a good idea!!!!

train your brain!!!

But are they really or are they just a waste of time?   we hear a lot about the negative impacts of children playing too many video games, so you must be wondering... why would games for the brain can be good..

Everything in moderation of course, but read on to discover 10 reasons to incorporate brain games into your daily workout routine:

1)       Brain exercise – Brain games challenge our language, math and problem-solving skills in ways that we may not otherwise find in our daily routine.
 
2)   Verbal Skills – Language based brain games help keep your vocabulary strong.  Games for the brain that encourage word finding are particularly beneficial. 
 
 3)     Creativity – Some brain games help stimulate right-brain thinking.  Look for games for the brain that include open-ended problem solving activities.  Think outside the box to solve problem.   At Shirsa, one of our favorites is Color Switch – give it a try.
 
4)     Memory Skills – Research shows that short-term memory skills can be improved by playing games for the brain.  Short-term memory skills can fade without stimulation as we age.  Practice holding new information in your mind and recalling it back.  Play games like Memorica, Memorica swing, Word Bubble to give your memory a workout.
 
 5)    Socialization – Not all games for the brain need to be played on the computer.  Find a friend and get out a deck of cards or the Scrabble board.  Enjoy socializing while you play.
 
6)  Change is good for the brain – Exposing your brain to a variety    of                                     cognitive tasks including online games for the brain can help support neuron growth in the brain.  Novel exercises are key, so change up your crossword puzzle and opt for more mathematical, language, novel games with Shirsa for twice or thrice a week.
 
7)    Hand eye coordination – Studies show that surgeons who played games for the brain a few hours a week had improved accuracy and efficiency during surgery.
 
8)    Stress Relief – Taking a short break to tackle a fun challenge can help you relax and provide a brief distraction from your current frustrations.
 
 
 9)  Pure Fun – Breaking away from your daily work to have fun is both good for your brain and offers you something to look forward to.  Use game time as a reward for completing your current task.
 
10)  Not So costly – There are many good  brain games available online or with a simple deck of cards.  Building a brain-healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to buy costly package.  Work to make small changes each day and enjoy some exercises with Shrisa
 

- Team Shirsa

Why Memory and Maths Don't Mix?????????

Can you compute your taxes while simultaneously remembering what you had for lunch yesterday? Neither can I. But doing two things at once isn’t always hard – in fact, it can be as easy as listening to music while driving, or talking or while cooking food.

Maths & Memory

 Stanford neuroscientist  Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, and his colleagues have shown in a study that recalling your own experiences and performing externally oriented tasks such as arithmetical reasoning are mutually exclusive. That’s because the same brain circuitry that must be activated for the former to proceed must be actively suppressed during the latter activity. 

The researchers showed that groups of nerve cells in a structure called the posterior medial cortex, or PMC, are strongly activated during a recall task such as trying to remember whether you had coffee yesterday, but just as strongly suppressed when you’re engaged in solving a math problem.

The PMC sits roughly where the brain’s two hemispheres meet, making it one tough place to visit, technically speaking. Yet neuroscientists would love to learn much more about the PMC, because it’s known to be a key player in introspective activities such as remembering past experiences, imagining the future, and just plain daydreaming.

Many more research about this field is still on its way, we will keep updating it in our Shirsa blogs.  

- Team Shirsa

Neurobis - Exercises For Your Brain!!!!!!!!!!!

Probably it happened to you to meet certain person and to not know his/her name, or to tell somebody about a nice movie and to forget the name of your favorite actor that is playing the main role. Many people stuck into such situation. Especially if you are a manager and you work with lost of people. The huge amount of information that we accept every day sometimes create problems with the memory. If you want better memory, and perform better at work you have to keep your brain active and in a good condition.

Neurobics

According to James Robert Watson, PhD neurobics (neuron + aerobics) are stretching exercises to increase oxygen and give your brain’s neurons more life by experiencing or participating in some new activity, place, or event. When you stretch your mind, it never returns to its previous shape. Research indicates that taxing the brain (making it ‘sweat’) with unfamiliar exercises can improve learning ability, memory, and problem solving.

Neurobic exercises differ from other brain exercises like logical puzzles, crosswords, sudoku, scrabble, etc.Why? Because they use human senses in a new way in order to stimulate the brain to create new associations between different types of information.

Neurobic can be applied by adults as well as children. It is used on children to increase their concentration in order they easily to gain new knowledge. Adults use it to keep their brain fit, because it you they don’t the brain functions to memorize and to solve problems will deteriorate.

- Team Shirsa

Shirsa : A Complete Health package.

Shirsa has your brain covered......

Our comprehensive training program enhances brain health and performance using clinically validated tools designed by neuroscientists.  Through Shirsa users can experience benefits that include:

Shirsa Package

• Clearer and quicker thinking
• Faster problem-solving skills
• Increased alertness and awareness
• Better concentration at work or while driving
• Sharper memory for names, numbers, and directions

No matter who you are, your brain needs care. 

Invest a few minutes today, and you could reap the rewards for years to come.

Your brain will thank you.

- Sukhada Desai

How Do I know Which Exercises To Use In Shirsa?

Think about what you most want to improve: your Memory, Attention, Brain Speed, Critical thinking, and Problem solving. 

Shirsa Exercises

Start with the exercises in that category. Please note, however, that the exercises are complementary, and working in one category will likely enhance benefits in another domain. 

We often recommend that people begin with Brain Speed, since increasing the speed with which the brain can work with information is the foundation for all other cognitive skills.


- Sukhada Desai

Is Shirsa Proven To Work? Have Studies Been Published?

Shirsa Proven to Work

Yes. Dozens of journal articles supports the impact of  brain training exercises on normal aging adults. 

These indicate that the Shirsa not only improves key standard measures of cognitive function (including speed and accuracy of processing, attention, and memory), they also improve key standard measures of quality of life (including health-related quality of life, feelings of control, depressive symptoms, and functional independence). 

If you are interested in learning more about our studies, click here. 

- Sukhada Desai

How Can Brain Fitness Exercises Improve My People Skills?

people's skills

We all want to feel sharp and confident in social situations. But sometimes our brains don’t cooperate. We might not remember what a friend told us, forget names we should know, or have trouble understanding other people’s intentions, body language, or tone of voice.

These exercises can change that. They are designed to speed up and sharpen the brain structure responsible for processing, storing, and remembering information that comes in handy in the social situations we all face every day.

Use Shirsa exercise to feel more tuned in to people around you for more successful and rewarding social interactions!

- Team Shirsa

How Do Brain Exercises Help My Memory?

Memory

Memories are made up of what you sense – especially what you see and hear. When memory fails, it’s not because you forgot how to remember. It’s  because your brain isn’t processing what you see and hear very clearly, so can only store “fuzzy” pictures of an event.

Shirsa exercises improve your brain’s recording of what you see and hear. That helps your brain create memory during the event, making it easier to recall later.

It’s like tuning up a radio – if your radio is in tune, you can hear a song clearly and remember its lyrics. If it’s full of static, it’s hard to remember.

Shirsa  exercise tune up your brain!

- Team Shirsa

How Does Attention Relate To Brain Fitness?

Attention

Does it drive you crazy when you can’t remember where you put your keys? You probably weren’t paying much attention when you set them down.

When You really pay attention to something, you remember it better. Focusing your attention causes your barin to rlease special chemicals that strengthen learning and memory. It’s one of the clever ways your brain keeps track of what matters to you, and lets go of what doesn’t.

It’s all too easy to pay less attention than we intend to. We get out of practice. Re-training your brain to focus better is a key part of improving memory!

   -  Team Shirsa

Why should I exercise my brain speed?

When it comes to brain speed, every millisecond counts. How quickly your brain can process events around you determines how effectively you can react to and remember those events.

But with age (and certain cognitive conditions), the brain slows down. This slowing is minute, but can have major effects. When you’re driving, for example, a few milliseconds is all it might take to turn a near miss into a bad crash.

Brain speed affects memory, too. A slower brain is a “fuzzier” brain it has trouble creating and storing clear pictures of what you see, hear, and otherwise sense. That affects your ability to remember clearly later.

- Team Shirsa

You Have The Power To Improve Your Brain!!!!!!!!

Improve your brain

Scientists once believed that mental ability was fixed after childhood. But over the last few decades, neuroscientists have discovered that adults’ brains are constantly changing – growing new neurons and connections – in a process known as neuroplasticity. Shirsa takes advantage of the brain’s innate neuroplasticity to help shape it into a more effective, powerful organ.







Instead of teaching specific skills that may only be useful in specific areas, Shirsa targets core cognitive processes that underlie performance in many different areas. These processes include memory, attention and other abilities that are critical in the real world.

Experimentally tested & clinically proven

The results of training with Shirsa are measured experimentally in randomized controlled trials. A typical experiment begins by measuring each person’s baseline abilities with tests of brain performance. After several weeks of training, each person is tested again to determine how much the Shirsa training has improved cognitive function.

Human Cognition Project – Uncovering the secrets of the brain

 The Human Cognition Project combines the database of human cognition – Pivot run Shirsa members who have collectively trained  – with a network of scientists and top neuroscience programs in the world – all to better understand human cognition so that we do more to improve brain performance.

Personalized for you

Each brain is unique, and everyone has different goals. We at Shirsa understands this and uses a patent-pending technology to combine the powerful database of the Human Cognition Project with sophisticated adaptive training algorithms to create a training program that’s right for each individual.

Personalized training programs are designed to help you achieve your goals. Additionally, each exercise adapts to your skill level, driving the maximum amount of benefit for each day of training. The more you tell us about your priorities, the more we can customize the training for you.


- Team Shirsa

Want To Get Rid of Memories Of Your Embarrassing Moments??

E arsing Memories

If you want to forget or wants to get rid of  any embarrassing actions which you may have done, than you're in luck: a new discovery reveals two ways that our minds can erase memories.

According to the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge, the brain erases traumatic and otherwise undesirable memories via two opposite mechanisms. The findings are published in the October 17 copy of Neuron.

In one method researchers have termed "direct suppression," the brain inhibits the processing of the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical for the formation of conscious memories. This interference prevents the memory from ever being recorded in the first place.

The other method, called "thought substitution," doesn't halt the memory from being recorded; instead, the brain alters its own wiring to replace the memory with something else.

"This study is the first demonstration of two distinct mechanisms that cause such forgetting: one by shutting down the remembering system, and the other by facilitating the remembering system to occupy awareness with a substitute memory," said Roland Benoit, the study's lead author, in a press release.

Researchers conducted the study with 36 volunteers instructed to remember and forget specific pairings of words. According to Business Insider, half the individuals were instructed to replace one word with a different word, while the other half were instructed to forget the word entirely. Researchers watched participants' brain activity while they repeatedly committed words to memory, then attempted to forget them.

The findings could have implications for a whole host of populations including veterans suffering from PTSD, or victims of traumatic crime.

- Team Shirsa

10 Ways To Rewire your Brain!!

Form many years we have a belief  that the human brain remained unchanging once it hit adulthood.

Healthy Habits

But in the early 1980s, neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, now a professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco, showed through his research that the brain is plastic. In other words, the brain can alter itself depending on environmental input.

Below is Dr. Merzenich's list of everyday things you can do to keep your brain fit.

Exercise Your Peripheral Vision

Actively challenging your peripheral vision improves brain performance and helps you navigate the world safely.

Recent studies shows that drivers stay on the road longer and have fewer accidents after actively training their useful field of view.

Memorize A Song

Developing better habits of careful listening will help your ability to understand, think and remember, you release brain chemicals like the neurotransmitter acetylcholine that enable plasticity and vivifies memory.

Reconstructing the song requires close attentional focus and an active memory.

Learn To Play A New Instrument
Playing an instrument helps you exercise many interrelated dimensions of brain function, including listening, control of refined movements and translation of written notes (sight) to music (movement and sound).

Too Much Time on Internet Turn Your Brain To Mush? - II

_ Team Shirsa

Use it or lose it!!

You want your retired life should be like this as shown in the picture? , think again! A recent paper with the title “Mental Retirement” is currently suggesting that early retirement may lead to quicker memory decline.
According to study conducted by  Laura L. Carstensen from Stanford University, suggests that work actually provides an important component of the environment that keeps people functioning optimally.” The analysis of the data which was collected for the study suggested people may have to engage in stimulating activities to preserve memory and reasoning skills after their retirement.

The study which was published by economists Susann Rohwedder and Robert J. Willis in The Journal of Economic Perspectives supports the “use it or lose it” theory, further they also supports the idea that cognitively stimulating activities may delay cognitive aging. 

It was started about 20 years ago by the National Institute on Aging on a sample of 22,000 Americans who were submitted to memory tests every two years. Several European then started their own national studies and are being followed by countries such as Japan and Corea, using similar proceedings in order to obtain comparable data. It was found that “the longer people in a country keep working, the better, as a group and also lives healthy, think healthy!!!

- Team Shirsa

How Does Your Memory Work?

You might think that your memory is there to help you remember facts, such as birthdays or shopping lists. If so, you would be very wrong. The ability to travel back in time in your mind is, perhaps, your most remarkable ability, and develops over your lifespan.

Horizon takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the human memory. From the woman who is having her most traumatic memories wiped by a pill, to the man with no memory, this film reveals how these remarkable human stories are transforming our understanding of this unique human ability.

The findings reveal the startling truth that everyone is little more than their own memory.

- Team Shirsa

Brain Training with Crossword Puzzles?

There has been a lot of debate over the years about whether or not working crossword puzzles can prevent Alzheimer’s Disease. 

It’s all a little confusing. Here’s the scoop: Crossword puzzles are great as a cognitive workout, but they cannot prevent Alzheimer’s Disease. Unfortunately, nothing can prevent a person from developing AD. However, doing brain stimulating activities that incorporate novelty, variety and complexity can help build your cognitive reserve and reduce the effects of dementia and AD. Anyways, crossword puzzles are still a great way to sharpen your cognitive skills.

Four Ways Crossword Puzzles Benefit Your Brain

1.     Enhance vocabulary  

2.     Strengthen word recall and memory

3.     Stimulate problem solving skills

4.     Improve focus and attention

If solving crossword puzzles is part of your routine, try changing it up a little. Variety and novelty are crucial components of cognitive reserve. Look for other word puzzles like acrostics or try a book with multiple kinds of word challenges.

If you get stuck, look up the information. Use the internet or reference guides to get info on a clue rather than looking at the answers. You are more likely to remember the information for future puzzles if you search for that information rather than just looking at the answer key.

- Team Shirsa