5 Important Ways To Exercise Your Brain!!!!

1.  Walk briskly several times a week to boost blood flow and oxygen to the brain.








2.  Eat green leafy vegetables and nuts to help support memory function.










3  Socialize with friends and family to maintain verbal fluency and emotional control. 












4.  Read anything and everything you find interesting.

5.  Play Brain Games to help form new neural pathways and improve cognitive skills.







- Team Shirsa

Is It repetition That Makes Strong Connection??

When playing with a child, signing a song, or reading a book together, you might frequently hear, "Do it again!!" We all have probably heard this request. 

Connections in your brain

This repetition is exactly what the developing brain needs. When experiences are repeated, the brain creates strong pathways of connections based on those experiences. The brain then retains those connections. 

If an experience doesn't happen frequently the brain eliminates connections made from those experiences. As explained it in our earlier blog as well the brain adapts to the environment it is exposed to. The "use it or loose it" process explains how this adaptation takes place. The brain adapts skills needed for survival and success for the world in which it lives. 

As a result, for healthy brain development and helping a child thrive, positive environments and experiences are needed.  Shirsa program for kids includes an activity which helps you to develop new connection among your young ones.

- Team Shirsa

Brain Facts That Every One Should Know!!!!!

Brain facts

The brain is perhaps the most fascinating organ in the human body. It controls everything from breathing to emotions to learning. If you work with children, here are some facts that you might find helpful, from how the brain affects learning to facts about memory to interesting facts about the brain that you can share with your students.

Brain Development and Learning

Read on to learn interesting facts about how the brain develops, what can affect that development, and how learning is impacted.

1. Read aloud. Parents and teachers who read aloud and talk often to young children are promoting brain development.
2. Bilingual brains. Children who learn two languages before the age of five have a different brain structure than children who learn only one language.
3. Child abuse and the brain. Studies have shown that child abuse can change the way the brain develops and can negatively affect learning.
4. New neurons. Throughout life, mental activity promotes the production of new neurons in the brain.
5. Handedness. Those who are left-handed or ambidextrous have a corpus collosum that is about 11% larger than those who are right-handed.
6. Brain growth. The human brain continues to grow until about age 18.
7. Stimulating environment. If a child is in a stimulating environment, she has a 25% greater ability to learn . Conversely, if she is in an environment with low stimulation, she has 25% less ability to learn.
8. Creative vs. methodical. Scientists have shown that creative thinkers’ brains work in different ways from the brains of those who think more methodically.
9. Food and intelligence. One study looked at students in New York and showed that those who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14% better on IQ tests than the students who ate lunches with these additives
10. Boredom. Humans have an innate curiosity, but when they have a lack of stimulation, boredom sets in.
11. Learning new things. A study shows that when people are learning new things, their brains change very quickly. Those learning to juggle showed change in the brain in as little as seven days.
12. Music. Children who take music lessons show a considerable increase in the ability to learn.
13. Reading faces. The area of the brain called the amygdala is responsible for the ability to read someone’s face for clues to how they are feeling.

- Team Shirsa

How much time does Shirsa takes in a day?

Brain training exercises

Shirsa exercises is designed so that you can spend as little as ten minutes to as much time as you like in it at any given time. 

Any training is better than none! 

A good rule of thumb is to follow the basic guidelines for physical exercises: As We do physical exercises to keep our body fit same way do brain exercise to keep your brain fit.

 Use it at least 10-15 minutes a day, and your brain will thank!!!!!!!! 

- Sukhada Desai

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

Diet Sodas: Change Your Brain And Your Waistline!!!

Diet sodas may not be helping you lose weight , in fact, these and other artificially sweetened foods may sabotage your diet by confusing and rewiring your brain’s reward centers. This study from the journal Physiology & Behavior is yet another example of how lifestyle choices can alter your brain—negatively or positively.

Scanning diet soda drinkers' brains

The University of San Diego study followed 24 young adults: half the group drank at least one serving of diet soda every day, while the other half avoided the artificially sweetened drinks. These adults were then hooked up to brain scanning equipment while scientists fed them water alternately flavored by natural and artificial sweeteners—then the researchers sat back and watched what unfolded in the brain.

The results, according to University of California San Diego researchers Green and Murphy, were pronounced: “[Diet soda drinkers] who consumed a greater number of diet sodas had reduced caudate head activation. These findings may provide some insight into the link between diet soda consumption and obesity.”

Can Your Brain’s Feelings Hurt Your Body, too?

Recent research shows that social rejection and physical pain are intrinsically linked in the brain.

brain feelings hurt your body

Dr. Naomi Eisenberger is revealing that the emotional benefits of socialization –acceptance, intimacy, friendship–are so crucial that any lack may hurt our bodies as well as our minds. Luckily, it’s possible that training can help improve emotional well-being.

How social rejection might affect physical pain

In an experiment published in the 2006 issue of the journal Pain, Eisenberger used 75 subjects to explore perceptions of physical pain in the context of social situations.

First, researchers identified each person’s unique pain threshold by transmitting varying levels of heat to the forearm. Subjects rated the pain level of each stimulus until they reached “very unpleasant.” This provided a baseline for personal thresholds of physical pain in normal situations.

Subjects then took part in a ball-tossing game involving three characters on a computer screen. One character represented the subject; researchers told everyone that the other two characters were played by real people (though the computer actually controlled everything). The subject was either socially included (the ball was regularly tossed to the subject) or not included (the ball was not tossed to the subject). In the last 30 seconds of the game, a new heat stimulus was applied and subjects rated its pain level.

Unsurprisingly, the non-included group reported 67% more social distress. More surprisingly, the same people who reported great social distress due to the game also reported higher pain ratings (based on threshold) at the end of the game—showing a link between social and physical pain.

Pain processing in the brain

Many fMRI studies have confirmed that emotional and physical pain both activate the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Still other studies note that people who suffer from physical conditions such as chronic pain are also more likely to have emotional anxiety and feel social rejection more deeply.

In other words, emotional health contributes in many ways to living a full life. Luckily, scientists have already found indications that you can train and control your emotions.

Researchers suggests that better emotional control is something everyone can strive towards, even if you’re in perfect health. Some of the cognitive processes involved in emotional well-being—such as executive control, which helps us plan rationally and control impulses—can also transfer to intellectual abilities that you rely on at work and in school. Get access to Shirsa today: it could benefit you in ways you might not have considered!

- Team Shirsa

Subconscious Mind controls 95% Of Our Daily Activities

Amazing Brain

- 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

The Best Gift You Can Give It To Your Dear Ones On This Festiv Season!!!!!!

As festival seasons are rapidly approaching, and if you’re like me, you may still be struggling with deciding what ‘perfect gift’ you should give your mate or aunt or sister that could really mean something for them.  

In the Land of Plenty, it is sometimes hard to determine what those individuals that we love can really benefit from, and may really need.

I suggest that you consider giving them both a Dassehara  or Diwali gift and a New Year’s resolution, all at the same time: the gift for a stronger and brighter future.  If you suggest them Brain Fitness Programs that we’ve created to help restore and sustain your brain fitness at Shirsa. 

You should seriously suggest this programe, because it is actually proven scientific studies that unequivocally show that most people DO very substantially wake up their brains and improve their memories and very significantly improve the quality of their lives if they spend a little time each day working at these exercises. 

It’s SCIENCE we’re talking about!

Unfortunately, I can’t use this gift option myself now because I have already given it to ALL of my  brothers, sisters, and in-laws and even my husband  to most of our older friends,  because there is no better gift i could give them.  

What would be the greater gift than a personally stronger, livelier and more capable life, going forward, over the next months and years.  

So if you’re feeling especially kindly this festiv season… give your dear ones the gift of brain fitness.

- Team Shirsa

Why Do We Have Brain?

With all of the complex brain science findings out there, I really enjoyed this TED talk from neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert that goes back to one of the most fundamental questions about brains: 

why do we have them at all? Wolpert argues that the only reason we evolved our brains is because we had to move, not because we had to think or feel. 

This is a fun and thought-provoking talk that may get you thinking about your brain in a markedly different way! 

Incidentally, Wolpert is a compelling and humorous speaker, too

- Team Shirsa

Are You A Left Handed or Right Handed Person?

Recently, scientists at the University of Oxford have gathered enough evidence to identify a novel gene for handedness. Even more astonishing, their research suggests that there is a link between handedness and language-related disorders.

Handedness

So then, what implications does this hold for right-handed and left-handed individuals? It is a well-known fact that most people are right-handed. 

Since the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body (and vice versa), then it is safe to assume that language is dominant in the left hemisphere of the brain for most people. 

From this theory, we should conclude that left-handed individuals hold language regions in their right hemisphere; however, left-handed individuals also display evidence of language in their left hemisphere, too.

In left-handed patients with aphasia (a language disorder that impairs language function as a result of a brain injury), symptoms tend to be milder than right-handed aphasic patients. This is strong enough evidence to suggest that left-handed individual hold more language regions than right-handed individuals.

Many questions remain about how language processing works in the brain. If left-handed individuals do in fact have a greater ability to retain language, could they also have a greater ability to acquire language than right-handed individuals? 

In addition, can the link between hand preference and disorders affect language development? Exploring new avenues of neuroscience can one day help us further understand ways in which the brain plays a powerful role in language development.

- Team Shirsa

Did you know that your brain has no pain? - Facts About Brain

Brain Facts

This is a fact that your brain doesn't have nerves to register pain within itself. It is obvious that there is no need to describe how important your brain is to your survival.

However what's not so clear is the many interesting facts there are about the brain. I have put together a list of the most fascinating facts that are associated with the brain.

Interesting Brain Facts

1. Every minute about 750ml of blood Pumps through your brain.

2. Your brain makes up about 2% of your body weight. 
3. A human brain is about 75% water. 
4. A human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons.
5. A human brain weighs about 1350g. 
6. Your brain stops growing at 18 years old. 
7. The Brain is pink because of the blood that flows through it.

8. The brain has 2 sides. The left side controls the right side of your body, while the right side controls the left side of your body.
9. A newborn baby's brain grows about 3 times in their first year. 
10. While you are awake your brain generates about 25 watts of power. 

- Team Shirsa

You Will Never Diagnose it, Untill Your Brain Gets Damaged!!!

Brain Healthy Lifestyle

Misplace your glasses or occasionally forget a friend’s name? These common memory lapses are normal – not signs of Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia that robs one of cognitive skills and independence. However, we now know Alzheimer’s starts in the brain decades before behavioral symptoms appear. But there are many ways to protect brain health. Read on for their expert tips...
We think of Alzheimer’s disease as an older person’s illness, but experts say critical proteins begin to break down as early as middle age. 

“Long before you really start to notice you’re more forgetful or having trouble learning new things, your brain is experiencing changes that lead to the plaques and tangles that typically occur in Alzheimer’s,” says Daniel G. Amen, M.D., a psychiatrist and author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Body.

Plaques are clumpy deposits of proteins that develop between brain cells in Alzheimer’s patients. They can block the brain from sending important messages. When nerve fibers that nourish the brain become twisted, they’re called tangles, another symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.

Because you’re not likely to get diagnosed early when this damage is just starting, adopt a healthy brain lifestyle through Shirsa now to stop symptoms before they start.

- Team Shirsa

What Are Night People And Morning People??

Day & night

I recently saw a research finding from 2009 that was pretty interesting. Canadian scientists studied people who self-identified as “morning people” or “night people” and found striking differences in brain activity patterns between the two groups. They noticed that neuronal excitability started high and decreased throughout the day for morning people, and started low and increased for night people.

They also measured spinal cord response, which they found increased throughout the day in everyone. They posited that this might mean that night people are able to increase strength to its maximum potential better than morning people, because their brain and spinal cord activity are in sync, whereas the brain and spinal cord activity of morning people are off-kilter with one going up while the other goes down.

The researchers are hoping these findings could help find ways to help shift workers or others who have to adjust their schedules contrary to their natural inclinations. You can learn more about the study here.

- 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

Too Much Time on Internet Turn Your Brain To Mush?

Web Surfing Image

I recently read an interesting article on CNN about all of the ways that spending too much time online can affect the brain.  I myself spend a lot of my days and nights on the internet. Is it all turning my brain to mush?

Some interesting findings reported in the article include:

Clifford Nass, a social psychologist at Stanford, says studies show multitasking on the Internet can make you forget how to read human emotions. When he showed online multitaskers pictures of faces, they had a hard time identifying the emotions they were showing.

 Oh no... That doesn’t sound too good. We  would definitely like to be able to read the emotions of our family and friends.

Over time, and with enough Internet usage, the structure of our brains can actually physically change, according to a new study. Researchers in China did MRIs on the brains of 18 college students who spent about 10 hours a day online. Compared with a control group who spent less than two hours a day online, these students had less gray matter, the thinking part of the brain.

Google surfing

Less gray matter? Also a little scary.

.

The article also provides a few tips for moving back to normalcy:

• Going offline–by limiting internet use between certain hours, 
• Going device-free for some amount of time, and even just staring out the window from time to time. 
• Get off the computer and take a walk around the office… although it would be hard for many people to leave their iPhones and blackbarries in the leaving room instead of taking it up to bed.

- Team Shirsa

I Have Got Another Reason To Fear High Cholesterol And High Blood Pressure!!

Effect on Cognitive skills

Recent  new study has shown that people with elevated cholesterol and blood pressure in middle age exhibit more problems with their memories as they age, as compared to people with good cardiovascular health.

 The study was conducted in nearly 5,000 people. The researchers looked at several factors to determine cardiovascular risk and found that people with just a 10% higher risk were prone to a quicker rate of cognitive decline.

 The only areas of cognition that seemed unaffected by cardiovascular risk were reasoning in men, and fluency (usually assessed by a word-finding or word-generating task) in women.

So how can you improve cardiovascular health and lower your risk for heart disease and increased cognitive decline?

 According to Mayo Clinic, you should try the following:

1) Choose lower fat protein sources like skim milk, fish, beans, and skinless chicken.

·    2) Try olive oil instead of butter

·    3) Eat lots of fruits and vegetables

·    4) Switch to whole grains for flour, bread, pasta, and rice, and cut the sugar to a minimum

·    5) Cut down on salt and salty condiments like soy sauce

·    6) Whatever you eat, be sure to control portion size so you don’t eat too much

·    7) Don’t smoke

·    8) Get some exercise regularly–even if it’s just a walk

·    9) Reduce stress in your life

      - Team Shirsa